"If it is relatively easy to
recruit a man to act as a
'sleeper', what about recruiting a foreigner to act as a real terrorist,
prepared to commit murder, use explosives and fire buildings? Surely
that is much more difficult? The answer is that, surprisingly, it is
not."

Viktor Suvorov

History tells us that major terror attacks, assassinations of important public figures or bombings are normally not
carried-out by disgruntled, independent individuals commonly referred
to by the mainstream press as "lone wolves". Every single political
assassination, bombing or terror operation, including the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the assassination of John F Kennedy has had accomplices other than individuals
thought to have organized and/or perpetrated the crime. Evidence clearly suggests that elements within the US government were somehow complicit in the aforementioned events that forever changed the course of history.In other words, Kennedy's assassination and the September 11 attacks were self-inflicted wounds meant to serve a
greater political purpose. The events on September 11, 2001 were unique in that the attacks also had the involvement of certain foreign powers allied to the US.We recently had another
spectacular terror attack in the US that attracted global attention.
Fortunately, this one in Boston was not as bloody as the previous one in
New York twelve
years ago. Nevertheless, several innocent lives were lost and dozens of
innocent people were maimed.Consequently, America is back in fear again and "hawks" are beating the war drums again, and I have a strong feeling that this is exactly how it was meant to play out.

There are basically five major categories within which the Tsarnaev brothers can be placed in: They were
either independent jihadists taking it upon themselves to "protect Islam" from perceived attacks by the US; vulnerable/gullible patsies framed for doing something that was organized by others; Manchurian Candidates, impressionable young men brainwashed by an intelligence agency to carry out a terrorist act; double agents serving for a US secret agency as well as another foreign entity; or chickens coming home to roost, radical Islamists biting the hand that fed them, similar to what occurred in Benghazi, Libya in September 11, 2012. In other words, consequences of Washington's intimate dealings with Islamic radicals around the world.

Before I go on: Regardless of why the two ethnic
Chechen brothers did what they did and who helped them do it, the
terror spectacle in Boston should remind us all to take yet another look
at
the bloody insurgency that took place in southern Russia during the
1990s. Most people to this day do not know that the bloody jihad against
Russian rule in the Caucasus region was covertly supported
by Western and Turkish military intelligence -

Thus, when
we remember terrorist bombings throughout the Russian Federation; blowing-up of Russian airliners; beheadings of captured Russian
soldiers and civilians; the
terrible Beslan school massacre; or the theater siege in Moscow... we
must remember that these terror operations were all ultimately a part of a
Western-Turkish-Islamist terror campaign to push Russian presence out of Muslim
populated regions of southern Russia.In other words, Islamic terrorism directly and indirectly served Western geostrategic interests in the region.

It's important to note here that Russia was not and is not their only target. Many of these Western-Turkish-Saudi backed Wahhabi/Salafist Islamic terrorists have also pursued their global jihad in places such as Armenia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India, Libya and Syria.

Although
periodic bombings and assassinations continue to take place in certain
hotspots, the foreign led Islamist insurgency in Russia's vulnerable underbelly has
been effectively if ruthlessly crushed by the Kremlin. As a result, a
majority of the defeated militants and their families from Chechnya,
Dagestan and Ingushetia have been driven out of their homelands. But
they continue their existence elsewhere. Traditionally a safe haven for
Russia's rebellious Muslims, many of these radical Islamists have taken refuge
in Turkey. Not surprisingly, as a result of Western support they have received in recent decades, many of these
militants and their families have also found refuge in Western countries. The Tsarnaev's were such a family, and it is very telling that Ruslan Tsarni (the paternal uncle of the Tsarnaev brothers) worked for USAID, Western/Turkish energy firms and was married to the Turkophilic daughter of a former, high ranking CIA official.

Nevertheless,
while Chechen terrorists were massacring Russians, they were
endearingly referred to as "freedom fighters" and as "rebels yearning for freedom" by US officials and by the
mainstream
news media in the US. The West even financed agencies and individuals in Russia to act as advocates for Chechens. Boris Berezovsky, the fugitive oligarch that was most probably murdered by his handlers recently in London was also a steadfast supporter of Chechen terrorism in Russia. Now that Americans have finally gotten a tiny, little taste
of
what Russians went through for over ten years at the hands of Wahhabist/Salafist fanatics, those that were once referred to as "freedom fighters" and "rebels" by US officials and news media executives are all of a sudden "criminals"
and "terrorists"...Getting back to the Tsarnaev brothers.Basing my opinion on information that we have been made aware of thus far,I
personally do not believe that the Tsarnaev brothers were "lone wolves"
as it is being suggested by some in the mainstream press, nor were
they Russian agents as some are also insinuating. And I do not believe the FBI was again found to be "incompetent"; or "dropped the ball";
or that they "screwed up" for the millionth time. Pleading ignorance has always been the American intelligence community's best method of covering up their complicity in crimes. I personally believe that US security officials knew exactly what the Tsarnaev brothers were up to.

Suggesting Russian involvement in this terror operation is silly, simply because of the well established fact that Russian authorities had alerted the FBI and the CIA
about Tamerlan's (the older brother's) ties to radical Islam. In fact,
Russian officials had also warned their US counterparts about Tamerlan's
mother.Moreover, it is virtually impossible that the two brothers
would have been capable of
traveling abroad; expressing extremist sentiments; procuring firearms and ammunition; purchasing significant quantities of fireworks from a pyrotechnics store; and build relatively sophisticated bombs with
timers or remote triggering mechanisms - without coming under police or FBI surveillance.It is virtually impossible that the two brother would be able to
successfully detonate two bombs and evade capture for several days -
especially since the older brother (who we are told was the ringleader)
was known to the FBI and the CIA; especially since the owner of the
pyrotechnics
chain-store in New Hampshire where Tamerlan had purchased fireworks had
alerted the FBI of the transaction. It is also very curious that Faisal
Shahzad, the so-called "Times Square bomber" had also purchased large
amounts of fireworks to use in a makeshift car-bomb from the same pyrotechnics store chain in a different state three years ago -

The Tsarnaev
brother's father, mother, uncle and aunt are now on record insisting
that the two brothers were framed by someone in the US. But being that
they are the relatives of the accused Chechen terrorists, their
suspicions are not surprising - nor are they important. However, family members did provide an interesting piece of information.The Armenian convertIn
televised
interviews by CNN, Ruslan Tsarni and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva (the mother of the brothers) claimed
that an Islamic convert of "Armenian" ancestry by the name of "Misha"
had "brainwashed" Tamerlan into radicalism. It was also reported that
this alleged Armenian convert was a red bearded, balding, heavyset man from Azerbaijan.It is a well known fact that Chechens have very close ties to
the Turkish community. In fact, there were some early reports that
claimed the Tsarnaevs have been to Turkey and that they have Turkish citizenry. It is also now known
that the Tsarnaevs have many Turkish acquaintances in the US.
Therefore, did the family have a malicious Turkish acquaintance
feeding them false information on the eve of April 24, when Armenians worldwide commemorate the genocide of 1.5
million Armenians by Turks? Is this "Misha" character an
Azeri or Turkish agent trying to defame Armenians in the US on the eve
of April 24, as some are suggesting? Very unlikely, in my opinion.Insisting that this "Misha" character could not be an Armenian (simply because Armenians were the first Christian nation or because of the Turkish genocide of Armenians) was a silly, premature and reflexive response by
the Armenian community. "Misha" has since turned up and has reportedly claimed to be half Armenian. If that is indeed the case, so what? To suggest that this alleged Armenian convert to Islam from Azerbaijan
somehow defames the Armenian nation or that he casts a dark shadow over
the Armenian community's genocide recognition efforts in the US is utterly-utterly silly and a very good indicator of how irrational, insecure and paranoid
Armenians tend to be in these types of matters.Armenians should not have been too quick to discount what the uncle and the mother claimed. Armenian converts to
Islam are not unprecedented. By saying unprecedented, I
am not only referring to intermarriages that sometimes occur between
Armenians and Muslims in which the Armenian side converts into Islam.Consider the following.Richard Giragosian is a half-Armenian
Rhode Island resident with a military intelligence background in the US. Agent Richard Giragosian is currently operating a Western-funded political "think tank" in Yerevan (the
founding of which was assisted by none-other-than Raffi Hovannisian). Agent Giragosian has admitted to have "converted" to Islam when he was married to an Algerian women.Did love make him do it? I seriously doubt it. What I'm trying to convey to the reader here is that some of the conversions to Islam or marriages with Muslims are done to penetrate a targeted society.And it's not only Armenians.There is of course the infamous Adam Gadahn (aka Adam Pearlman) and the lesser known Yousef Al-Khattab, two American-Jews who supposedly converted to Islam and became outspoken advocates of the mysterious terror group known as "Al-Qaeda" -

If "Misha the Armenian convert" drove Tamerlan into extremism, it clearly suggests to me that the terror operation in
Boston was indeed organized by a domestic spy agency, or may have been an FBI "sting
operation" gone awry. Nevertheless, if
Ruslan Tsarni's and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva's claims about the Armenian
convert is false - then I would expect US law enforcement officials
to do their job and arrest them both on charges of disseminating false information and misleading a
very serious criminal investigation.Wouldn't this
allegedly "red bearded Armenian convert" be a prime suspect for officials who as we are told are desperately seeking answers to what happened? For
about two weeks, Boston police, Homeland Security, the FBI or the CIA
could not find a balding, red-bearded, Armenian Muslim immigrant from
Azerbaijan in or near Massachusetts?!About two weeks after the bombing and after a lot of chatter about who Misha was, it was finally reported that the
FBI knew his identity and whereabouts. But why hasn't Misha been arrested right away? Again, isn't he a prime suspect?! Isn't he said to be the radicalizer of Tamerlan? Why aren't teams of FBI agents and emergency police teams surrounding his home? Why aren't there legions of news reporters armed with news cameras breaking his door down to speak to him?What's with the silence about him from law enforcement authorities and the news media?As of this writing, Misha is still a free man. The alleged radicalizer of Tamerlan has not been taken in and interrogated. In fact, he has all but disappeared. And the only person that was reported to have met him was a Russian speaking individual named Christian Caryl from The New York Review of Books. Folk, think for a moment: All they do is send an obscure journalist (who probably
has ties to security officials) to interview a man as important to the
on-going investigation as Misha?!Why am I now not surprised that Christian Caryl has been busy on television and on social media whitewashing and downplaying the role Misha was said to have played in driving Tamerlan into extremism. It's highly suspicious that there has been a lot of restraint with regards to this Misha character from law enforcement bodies in the US. Something's seriously not right here. Needless to say, I suspect some kind of a coverup.Let's
get to the bottom of this! I want this "Armenian convert" taken in and fully investigated by law enforcement authorities. Let's find out who he is
and who he works for. And if Misha is truly innocent of all wrong doing (although how can we
be sure of his innocence if he has not been properly interrogated and investigated) then Ruslan Tsarni and Zubeidat
Tsarnaeva should be brought up on charges and arrested for providing false information and misleading the investigation! But I am not holding my breath because this case stinks to high heaven.I believe security officials in the US know a lot more than they are admitting. I believe the Tsarnaev brothers did not act alone. I believe that counter-terrorism agencies in the US knew what the brothers were up to. Therefore, there will indeed be things that
the FBI and the CIA will not want the American public to know, and that is exactly why this case will not get much past memorial services,
superficial bouts of flag waving and shouting of USA! USA! USA! FBI ringleaders?

Although Americans are too
distracted by
entertainment, propaganda and trying to pay their ever-increasing
bills to notice it, the US has morphed into a massive, Orwellian police state. The control
that the US government yields over Americans today is unprecedented, not only in
American
history but in the annals of world history. I
personally believe that the latest acts of terrorism in Boston need to be
looked at from within the context of the modern American police state.

As mentioned above, it is well
known that in the US some converts to Islam, as well as individuals born
into the Muslim faith are undercover agents hired to keep a close eye
on the Muslim community in the country. What's less well known is that these
undercover agents have also been known
to organize elaborate "sting operations" by provoking susceptible (i.e. naive, fanatical or intellectually deficient) individuals within the Muslim community into carrying-out acts of violence. The following are two videos relevant to this topic -

Government agents regularly recruit disgruntled and/or fanatical, young men with low
intelligence to do their dirty work.Actually,
this is a fairly common way of recruiting terrorists around the world these days. This approach has been around for many years and it has been perfected
by many different intelligence organizations. The Israeli Mossad, the Russian FSB, the British MI6 and of course the American CIA excel at this modus operandi. From the inner-cities of the western world
to the Palestinian slums of Lebanon to the stone-age villages of Afghanistan,
there are literally tens-of-millions of
uneducated, unemployed, desperate, angry and psychologically troubled young men (and women)
waiting to be plucked by agents armed with
jihadi rhetoric or bags of cash (using whichever method happens to
work best).Every
single Mosque, Islamic student group or Islamic community center in the US is under government surveillance. Nothing happens
in Islamic communities in the US without law-enforcement bodies not
knowing about them.

Therefore, call me a "conspiracy theorist" but I do not for one minute believe that the Tsarnaev brothers
were able to plan - alone or with foreign assistance - a terror operation, arm themselves with guns, ammunition
and fairly sophisticated bombs with remote triggers right under the FBI's nose
without the FBI not knowing about it. If the brothers are guilty of the crime they are accused of carrying-out, it clearly suggests that they had handlers guiding
them.Moreover, it is now becoming increasingly apparent that early reports about a bomb drill being conducted in Boston during same day as the marathon is accurate. A bomb drill was indeed being conducted in the vicinity of the marathon in Boston when the two bombs exploded. I do not know it's significance but there are even pictures of what seems to be unidentified but uniformed operatives loitering near the finish line shortly before the explosions. For more information please see relevant articles on this page.

Although it may not absolve them from any responsibility whatsoever, it
is increasingly looking as if the Tsarnaev brothers may have indeed
been setup by US security officials. However, there is also the real possibility that Tamerlan could have been a double agent serving two masters, one in the US and one overseas. Although it's too early to tell precisely who
were the primary organizers of this terror operation, I personally suspect them to be
elements within the FBI or the CIA. And only time will tell why it was done.However, if I had to guess, I would say this operation was carried-out to give the waning "war on terror" a timely boost, a new life - especially with war against Syria and Iran on the horizon.The particulars of the bombing will not matter in the end. What the American cattle will ultimately take away from this incident is that America is again under attack from Arabs, Muslims or Middle Eastern people. The following is a good rationalization that may be presented by media pundits and
government officials in the near future -

If we don't begin intervening on behalf of Syria's embattled rebels, they may begin hating America or begin plotting against America in the future... If we don't begin intervening on behalf of Syria's embattled rebels, Islamic extremist amongst them may takeover the movement... If we don't begin intervening in Syria, chemical/biological weapons will fall into extremist hands...

Therefore, as you can see, what happened with the Tsarnaev brothers can easily be spun into a politically expedient matter that can potentially serve Western interests. And this is essentially what's important for US security officials.What
I am stating here is not a "conspiracy theory" it is a fact of life
in Washington's so-called "war on terror", a long-term global war to project Western power into strategic, resource rich regions of the world and keep potential competitors such as Russia and China in check. I also think it's important to look at what happened in Boston in the context of three other curious recent developments -

1) A large segment of an aircraft's landing gear said to be that of one of the airliners that crashed into the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001 was miraculously found tightly wedged between two buildings, one of which just happened to be the controversial Mosque near what is known as ground zero in Manhattan.

2) Canadian security officials uncovered an alleged terrorist plot to blow-up a New York bound Canadian train
which was said to have been organized by "Al-Qaeda
elements in Iran".

3) Ricin contaminated letters were sent to US President Barack
Obama and two other American officials.

First, there is no Al-Qaeda in Iran. If any Al-Qaeda elements do somehow turn-up in Iran, they are working for Western, Israeli, Pakistani and/or Saudi Arabian interest. This is a Western effort to keep the public afraid of Iran. The miraculous discovery of a large piece of an airliner found next to the controversial Mosque near ground zero in Manhattan was clearly meant to be a psychological operation. They are attempting to emotionally/subconsciously tie the terror attack in Boston with the one that occurred in New York twelve years ago and use the opportunity to take a jab at the antagonistic Mosque in question. Finally, anyone remember the deadly anthrax letters that came on the heels of the September 11, 2001 attacks? Anyone remember who sent them? The person investigators revealed to be responsible for them was a government employed microbiologist by the name of Bruce Ivins. Bruce Lvins was eventually suicided. Let's see how this ricin letter thing will play out this time.Someone, somewhere is trying to sow fear in the general public once again, because as we know, fear (i.e. thinking that your nation is under attack) is a proven method of control. I have a strong feeling that what happened in Boston was packaged to act as a mini 9/11, and it was meant to reawaken the fear and anger that the 9/11 attacks first placed in the hearts and minds of Americans over twelve years ago.

Closer look at Islamic
radicalismIt is not surprising that one of the most notorious proliferators of Islamic radicalism around the world
lives in the US. His name is Fethullah Gulen, he is a Turk and he most probably works for the
CIA. I would not be
surprised if it was discovered that the Tsarnaev brothers were in some
way connected to this Turkish Islamist living right under Washington's
nose. An article about him can be read on this page.

It is through Islamic activists like Fethullah Gulen that Western intelligence agencies find, organize, train and sometimes send Islamic extremists to hotspots in places such as Russia, Serbia, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria and Iran. Men similar to Fethullah Gulen exist is most Western nations today: US, Australia, Britain, Canada, Belgium, France and Germany in particular. Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his comrade William Plotnikov, an Islamic extremist from Canada that was recently killed by Russian special forces in southern Russia (an RT article about him is posted on this page) are good examples of the aforementioned process. Tamerlan was one of many that are radicalized in the West and sent overseas to pursue jihad. This is why Tamerlan traveled to Russia in 2011. Under the watchful eyes of the FBI and the CIA, the extremism of men like Tamerlan are cultivated and nurtured, and when need be used against targets of the political West... But in the case of Tamerlan something seemed to have either changed or went awry along the way.Again, what I am stating here is not a conspiracy theory. None-Islamic powers have been exploiting Islamic radicalism for decades, and doing so seems a lot easier than one would imagine.The article immediately below this commentary is about a book called Spetsnaz, written by a Soviet defector named Viktor Suvorov. The book in question refers to the Soviet Union's exploitation of radical movements around the world, including Islamic ones. In today's political
climate, the information provided by Viktor Suvorov's book will interest many readers.The kind of insider information provided by this author would
help the reader better understand how secret services operate. Reading
it will also help one place high profile terrorist operations such as
the one that occurred in the United States on September 11, 2001 under a
different, more troubling light.Although
the author in question had a very obvious anti-Russian/anti-Soviet political
agenda, we must bare in mind that the dark nature of intelligence
services is not exclusive to Russia or the Soviet Union for they fully apply to various other
agencies found around the world as well. It is well known that American,
British, Israeli, Saudi Arabian and Pakistani intelligence services
also engage in gathering, training, organizing and utilizing
"terrorist" cells throughout the world. In
fact, the aforementioned nations, allied in many regards, are by-far the most prolific
when it comes to exploiting Islamic militants around the
world.Therefore, in
my opinion, there are no "terror" groups in existence today, Islamic or
otherwise, that are not supported or funded or exploited by one major power or
another. The world, especially the Middle East and Central Asia, is full
of young, fanatical, disgruntled, troubled, violent and functionally illiterate
men and women that have the potential for becoming terrorists for one
political interest or another. All it takes is a group of well-funded
and well-trained specialists to recruit, organize, train and when need
be - utilize!

CIA's Islamic wingFor senior policymakers in
Washington, the geostrategic benefits brought upon by their support of
"Al-Qaeda" type movements in certain areas of the world far outweighs
the inherent risks involved with dealing with "Al-Qaeda" type movements. In
the absence of true ideological movements in the world, radical Islam
has been the spark to get things done around the world.Wasn't it through such extremist movements that Western powers realized their geostrategic goals in places such as Afghanistan, southern Russia, the Balkans and north Africa? Isn't it through such movements that the West is currently destroying Syria and putting pressure on Iran? The following is a very poignant comment by a Libyan official before Mummar Qadaffi was overthrown by Al-Qaeda led rebels -

"What we are facing now in this war is NATO led by al-Qaeda. The
European and western officials are lying to their people when they say
they are fighting terrorism. In fact they are fighting with terrorism
against the Libyan nation and they are following al Qaeda's orders."

Therefore, as far as Washingtonians are
concerned, what's the big deal if some Americans get blown to bits once
in a while - as long as the American empire remains a global hegemon?!
As far as Washingtonians are concerned,
what's the big deal if America is made to suffer some real-estate damage once in a while - if such a thing can be cleverly exploited towards long-term geostrategic agendas?!

Aren't
the terrible events of September 11, 2001 continuing to be used as a
powerful excuse to implement a geostrategic agenda to remake the world
in Washington's image... and of course earn, squander or steal trillions
of dollars in the process?! The following is my take on the events that forever changed the world -

It is quite obvious that the Wahhabist/Salafist terror group popularly known as "Al-Qaeda" is
more-or-less serving as the Islamic military wing of Western intelligence agencies. And the bloodletting we have been
witnessing in the region during the past twenty five years is a long-term
strategy to ensure that the Anglo-American-Zionist global order
maintains its hegemonic power well into the twenty-first century -

To
realize their neo-imperial dreams in strategic places like the Balkans,
Middle East, Caucasus, Africa and Central Asia, they have been busy
collaborating with radicals throughout the Islamic world to do their
dirty work. Of course much of this type of activity gets carried-out
covertly by Western intelligence operatives and through certain allied
Islamic nations that maintain strong connections with radical Islamic groups.
For instance, it is well known that the Saudi Arabian and Pakistani governments are two of the most
active proliferator of Islamic radicalism around the world. It is also
well known that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are two of Washington's closest allies in the region.The real enemy is nationalismDuring the past century, the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia have systematically become radicalized as a result of Western interventions.
Today, the Middle East in particular stands on the verge of a radical Islamic
transformation and this is occurring with the tacit support of the
Western alliance. One does not need to be a rocket scientist to realize
that Washington and its allies in the Arabian peninsula have helped
Islamic forces in the region at every pivotal turn. The Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, is of
course a notable exception to this.Besides using Islamic militants to fight against Russian and Iranian influences in the region, the West also uses Islamic movements to impede the growth of secular, nationalistic leaders such as Mohammad Mossadeq, Abdel Nasser, Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad. The West has always feared independent, nationalistic leaders in the very strategic and oil rich region. This
is essentially the reason why Mossadegh
was overthrown in Iran; this is essentially the reason why Nasser was killed in Egypt; this is essentially the reason why Saddam was killed in Iraq; this is essentially the reason why Qaddafi was killed in Libya; and this is essentially the reason why they are currently trying to kill Assad in Syria.Therefore, the West is
deriving benefits by keeping the region free of nationalist
leaders. In other words, disregard what you have been hearing on CNN and BBC and realize
that senior Western policymakers actually prefer dealing with Islamic
societies in the region rather
than with independent, secular ones.Therefore,
it should not come as a surprise that Washington has been "training"
Islamic political parties in Egypt; it should not come as a surprise
that Washington has been encouraging/funding Islamic militants in
Kurdistan, Iraq and Pakistan to carryout terrorist attacks in Iran; it should not come as a surprise that promoters of Islamic fundamentalism such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are Washington's allies; it
should not come as a surprise that Western-backed Libyan rebels have had
close ties with Al-Qaeda; it
should not come as a surprise that Western leaders are overseeing the
transfer of Libya's Al-Qaeda connected Islamic terrorists into Syria via
Turkey; it should not come as a surprise that Washington teamed up with Al-Qaeda linked militants to help Albanians, Bosnians and Chechens defeat Serbians and Russians.The following are excerpts from a previous blog entry that I'd like the reader to revisit:

"Al-Qaeda"
is the covert Islamic military wing of Western and Saudi Arabian
intelligence services. I am speaking of the "Al-Qaeda" leadership and not
the organization's limitless supply of illiterate foot-soldiers that
work for them thinking they are doing Allah's work on earth.

Those
Islamists we hear about getting assassinated or blown-up by Washington's
drones
from time-to-time are more-or-less those that refuse to play the game. In other words,
Islamic groups that are in reality targeted by Washington and its allies,
some
may be splinter groups, some may be groups that have sprung-up
spontaneously and some may be groups supported by rival political
interests.

By
supporting the rise of Islamic radicals in targeted region through "democratic" movements, the West is also
planting within the region the very seeds of its eventual destruction.
After all, when these socially primitive and politically dysfunctional
Islamic powers get out of hand, as they tend to from time-to-time, they will
simply be bombed into submission.

In this day in age, the wholesale
killing of Muslims is not a major ethical dilemma for western society.
Hollywood and the mainstream news press in the western world have been successful
in dehumanizing Muslims in the eyes of western populations.

Due
to their cultural backwardness and archaic mentalities, Islamic
societies are easily manipulated and there are virtually limitless
supplies of easily manipulated men and women waiting to be recruited by one warlord or another - or by
one intelligence agency or another.

The surest way to defeat your
enemy is to create your enemy yourself. For many years
Washington's many enemies
have been custom made, tailor fit for exploitation, manipulation and final destruction. Islamic radicalism is
a volatile yet convenient tool Western officials have been exploiting
against their rivals for decades. And precisely due to its inherent
volatility, dealing with Islamic radicals sometimes backfires. Western officials need to stop playing with fire.I have posted a number of very revealing articles on this page about Western ties to Islamic radicalism as well as a number of news reports about the Tsarnaev brothers that have caught my attention during the past two weeks. As usual, I have to remind the reader that some of these news reports and articles will require reading between the lines because they were written by presstitutes of the controlled news press in the US.ArevordiApril, 2013

***

Special Forces and Islamic Terrorism

To help our readers understand how this clique works, and what it means
today, I am posting a series of important quotes from the book,
"Spetsnaz" by the defector, Viktor Suvorov. I believe that readers will
have a better understanding of the role Russia's Spetsnaz (elite special
unit of the GRU) played in terrorism and how it continues to support
terrorism by operating through the mafia or in the security services
themselves.

Quotes From "Spetsnaz" by Viktor Suvorov

"…Soviet secret police, the KGB, carries out different functions (than
the Spetsnaz) and has other priorities. It has its own terrorist
apparatus, which includes an organization very similar to spetsnaz,
known as osnaz. The KGB uses osnaz for carrying out a range of tasks not
dissimilar to those performed by the GRU's spetsnaz. But the Soviet
leaders consider that it is best not to have any monopolies in the field
of secret warfare. Competition, they feel, gives far better results
than ration."

"…Osnaz apparently came into being practically at the same time as the
Communist dictatorship. In the very first moments of the existence of
the Soviet regime, we find references to detachments osobogo
nazhacheniya-special purpose detachments. Osnaz means military-terrorist
units, which came into being as shock troops of the Communist Party
whose job was to defend the party. Osnaz was later handed over to the
secret police, which changed its own name from time to time as easily as
a snake changes its skins: Cheka-Vcheka-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB-MVD-KGB.
Once a snake, however, always a snake."

"It is the fact that Spetsnaz belongs to the army, and Osnaz to the
secret police, that accounts for all the differences between them.
Spetsnaz operates mainly against external enemies; Osnaz does the same
but mainly in its own territory and against its own citizens. Even if
both Spetsnaz and Osnaz are faced with carrying out one and the same
operation, the Soviet leadership is not inclined to rely so much on
co-operation between the army and the secret police as on the strong
competitive instincts between them."

"…Thus if it is relatively easy to recruit a man to act as a
'sleeper', what about recruiting a foreigner to act as a real terrorist,
prepared to commit murder, use explosives and fire buildings? Surely
that is much more difficult? The answer is that, surprisingly, it is
not."

"A Spetsnaz officer out to recruit agents for direct terrorist action
has a wonderful base for his work in the West. There are a tremendous
number of people who are discontented and ready to protest against
absolutely anything. And while millions protest peacefully, some
individuals will resort to any means to make their protest. The spetsnaz
officer has only to find the malcontent who is ready to go to
extremes."

"On another occasion a group of animal rights activists in the UK
injected bars of chocolate with poison. If spetsnaz were able to contact
that group, and there is every chance it might, it would be extremely
keen (without, of course, mentioning its name) to suggest to them a
number of even more effective ways of protesting. Activists, radicals,
peace campaigners, green party members: as far as the leaders of the GRU
are concerned, these are like ripe water-melons, green on the outside,
but red on the inside-and mouth-watering. So there is a good base for
recruiting."

"The spetsnaz network of agents has much in common with international
terrorism, a common center, for example-yet they are different things
and must not be confused. It would be foolhardy to claim that
international terrorism came into being on orders from Moscow. But to
claim that, without Moscow's support, international terrorism would
never have assumed the scale it has would not be rash. Terrorism has
been born in a variety of situations, in various circumstances and in
different kinds of soil. Local nationalism has always been a potent
source, and the Soviet Union supports it in any form, just as it offers
concrete support to extremist groups operating within nationalist
movements. Exceptions are made, of course, of the nationalist groups
within the Soviet Union and the countries under its influence."

"If groups of extremists emerge in areas where there is no sure Soviet
influence, you may be sure that the Soviet Union will very shortly be
their best friend. In the GRU alone there are two independent and very
powerful bodies dealing with questions relating to extremists and
terrorists."

"…The GRU's tactics toward terrorists are simple: never give them any
orders, never tell them what to do. They are destroying Western
civilization: they know how to do it, the argument goes, so let them get
on with it unfettered by petty supervision. Among them there are
idealists ready to die for their own ideas. So let them die for them.
The most important thing is to preserve their illusion that they are
completely free and independent."

"Although the vast majority of spetsnaz is made up of Slavonic
personnel, there are some exceptions…And spetsnaz contains Turks, Kurds,
Greeks, Koreans, Mongolians, Finns and people of other nationalities." "The Soviet Union condemns the civil war in Lebanon. But there is no
need for it to condemn the war. All it has to do is hold back the next
transportation of ammunition and war will cease." "Apart from military and financial support, the Soviet Union also
provides the terrorists aid in the form of training. Training centers
have been set up in the Soviet Union for training terrorists from a
number of different countries."

"Every terrorist is studied carefully during his training, and among
them will be noted the potential leaders and the born rebels who will
not submit to any authority…Of equal importance are the students'
weaknesses and ambitions, and their relationships with one another. Some
time, many years ahead, one of them may become an important leader, but
not one approved by Moscow, so it is vital to know in advance who his
likely friends and enemies will be."

"The reward for the GRU is that a terrorist doing work for spetsnaz
does not, in the great majority of cases, suspect he is being used. He
is utterly convinced that he is acting independently, of his own will
and by his own choice. The GRU does not leave its signature or his
fingerprints around."

"Even in cases where it is not a question of individual terrorists but
of experienced leaders of terrorist organizations, the GRU takes
extraordinary steps to ensure that not only all outsiders but even the
terrorist leader himself should not realize the extent of his
subordination to spetsnaz and consequently to the GRU."

"The overture is a series of large and small operations the purpose of
which is, before actual military operations begin, to weaken the enemy's
morale, create an atmosphere of general suspicion, fear and
uncertainty, and divert the attention of the enemy's armies and police
forces to a huge number of different targets, each of which may be the
object of the next attack."

"The overture is carried by agents of the secret services of the
Soviet satellite countries and by mercenaries recruited by
intermediaries. The principal method employed at this stage is "gray
terror", that is, a kind of terror which is not conducted in the name of
the Soviet Union. The Soviet secret services do not at this stage leave
their visiting cards, or leave other people's cards. The terror is
carried out in the name of already existing extremist groups not
connected in any way with the Soviet Union, or in the name of the
fictitious organizations. The GRU reckons that in this period its
operations should be regarded as natural disasters, actions by forces
beyond human control, mistakes by people, or as terrorist acts by
organizations not connected with the Soviet Union."

"The terrorist acts carried out in the course of the 'overture'
require very few people, very few weapons and little equipment. In some
cases all that may be needed is one man who has a weapon nothing more
than a screwdriver, a box of marches or a glass ampoule. Some of the
operations can have catastrophic consequences. For example, an epidemic
of an infectious disease at seven of the most important naval bases in
the West could have the effect of halving the combined naval might of
the Soviet Union's enemies."

"There is a marked increase in the strength of the peace movement. In
many countries there are continual demand to make the country neutral
and not to support American foreign policy, which has been discredited.
At this point the 'gray terror' gathers scope and strength and in the
last days of peace reaches its peak."

There is no doubt that the Soviet Union played a tremendous role in
the expansion and evolution of Islamic terrorism. Many of the people
responsible for the policy of promoting fundamentalist miliancy still
hold key positions in Russia. People can accept the fact that there are
"anti-Bush" cliques inside the CIA and State Department, and the fact
that there are "pro-Bin Laden" cliques in the Pakistani military ISI.
Yet, for some strange reason, they cannot accept the fact that there are
still "pro-Marxist" cliques inside Russia. I believe that the Russian
Mafia operates in unison with these "rogue" elements, almost as a
separate intelligence directorate.

General Leonid Ivashov (left) with journalist Christopher Bollyn from American Free Press

General Leonid Ivashov was the
Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces when the September 11,
2001, attacks took place. This military man, who lived the events from
the inside, offers an analysis which is very different to that of his
American colleagues. As he did during the Axis for Peace 2005
conference, he now explains that international terrorism does not exist
and that the September 11 attacks were the result of a set-up. What we
are seeing is a manipulation by the big powers; this terrorism would
not exist without them. He affirms that, instead of faking a "world war
on terror", the best way to reduce that kind of attacks is through
respect for international law and peaceful cooperation among countries
and their citizens.

As the current international situation shows, terrorism emerges where
contradiction aggravate, where there is a change of social relations or a
change of regime, where there is political, economic or social
instability, where there is moral decadence, where cynicism and nihilism
triumph, where vice is legalized and where crime spreads. It is
globalization what creates the conditions for the emergence of these
extremely dangerous phenomena. It is in this context that the new world
geo-strategic map is being designed, that the resources of the planet
are being re-distributed, that borders are disappearing, that
international law is being torn into pieces, that cultural identities
are being erased, that spiritual life becomes impoverished...

The analysis of the essence of the globalization process, the military
and political doctrines of the United States and other countries, shows
that terrorism contributes to a world dominance and the submissiveness
of states to a global oligarchy. This means that terrorism is not
something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a
means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a
pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new
world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key
element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its "godfather". The
main target of the world elite is the historical, cultural, traditional
and natural reality; the existing system of relations among states;
the world national and state order of human civilization and national
identity.

Today's international terrorism is a phenomenon that combines the use
of terror by state and non-state political structures as a means to
attain their political objectives through people's intimidation,
psychological and social destabilization, the elimination of resistance
from power organizations and the creation of appropriate conditions
for the manipulation of the countries' policies and the behavior of
people. Terrorism is the weapon used in a new type of war. At the same
time, international terrorism, in complicity with the media, becomes
the manager of global processes. It is precisely the symbiosis between
media and terror, which allows modifying international politics and the
exiting reality. In this context, if we analyze what happened on
September 11, 2001, in the United States, we can arrive at the following
conclusions:

1. The organizers of those attacks were the political and
business circles interested in destabilizing the world order and who
had the means necessary to finance the operation. The political
conception of this action matured there where tensions emerged in the
administration of financial and other types of resources. We have to
look for the reasons of the attacks in the coincidence of interests of
the big capital at global and transnational levels, in the circles that
were not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its
direction. Unlike traditional wars, whose conception is determined by
generals and politicians, the oligarchs and politicians submitted to
the former were the ones who did it this time.

2. Only secret services and their current chiefs x or those
retired but still having influence inside the state organizations x
have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such
magnitude. Generally, secret services create, finance and control
extremist organizations. Without the support of secret services, these
organizations cannot exist x let alone carry out operations of such
magnitude inside countries so well protected. Planning and carrying out
an operation on this scale is extremely complex.

3. Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the organizers nor
the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the
necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of
professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras
to mask the operation. The September 11 operation modified the course
of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias
and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the
planet's natural resources, the world information network and the
financial flows. This operation also favored the US economic and
political elite that also seeks world dominance. General Leonid Ivashov
with journalist Christopher Bollyn from American Free Press

The use of the term "international terrorism" has the following goals:

Hiding the real objectives of the forces deployed all over the world in the struggle for dominance and control;Turning the people's demands to a struggle of undefined goals against an invisible enemy;Destroying basic international norms and changing concepts such as:
aggression, state terror, dictatorship or movement of national
liberation; Depriving peoples of their legitimate right to fight against
aggressions and to reject the work of foreign intelligence services; Establishing the principle of renunciation to national interests,
transforming objectives in the military field by giving priority to the
war on terror, violating the logic of military alliances to the
detriment of a joint defense and to favor the anti-terrorist coalition;

Solving economic problems through a tough military rule using the
war on terror as a pretext. In order to fight in an efficient way
against international terrorism it is necessary to take the following
steps:

To confirm before the UN General Assembly the principles of the UN
Charter and international law as principles that all states are obliged
to respect; To create a geo-strategic organization (perhaps inspired in the
Cooperation Organization of Shanghai comprised of Russia, China,
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) with a set of values
different to that of the Atlantists; To design a strategy of development of states, a system of
international security, another financial and economic model (which
would mean that the world would again rest on two pillars); To associate (under the United Nations) the scientific elites in the
design and promotion of the philosophical concepts of the Human Being
of the 21st Century. To organize the interaction of all religious
denominations in the world, on behalf of the stability of humanity's
development, security and mutual support.

General Leonid Ivashov

General
Leonid Ivashov is the vice-president of the Academy on geopolitical
affairs. He was the chief of the department for General affairs in the
Soviet Union's ministry of Defense, secretary of the Council of defense
ministers of the Community of independant states (CIS), chief of the
Military cooperation department at the Russian federation's Ministry of
defense and Joint chief of staff of the Russian armies.

Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda
and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but
the material may never find its way into court because of legal and
diplomatic obstacles. The case has put the Obama administration in the
middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding
with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal
action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence
documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers
for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers’ copies
destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the
material.

The Saudis and their
defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they
have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back
the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign
immunity. Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject
of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have
said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist
groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country.
But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled
by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an
unusually detailed look at some of the evidence. Internal Treasury Department
documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act,
for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International
Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi
royal family, showed “support for terrorist organizations” at least
through 2006.

A
self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with
lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by
members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to
Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s
and hired militant operatives like himself. Another witness in
Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had witnessed an
emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki al-Faisal, hand a check for
one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $267 million) to a top Taliban
leader. And a confidential German intelligence report gave a
line-by-line description of tens of millions of dollars in bank
transfers, with dates and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by
Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family
to another charity that was suspected of financing militants’
activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

The
new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are among
several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained by
the Sept. 11 families and their insurers as part of a long-running civil
lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia
and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda. Only a fraction of
the documents have been entered into the court record, and much of the
new material is unknown even to the Saudi lawyers in the case. The
documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the
events of Sept. 11, 2001. And the broader links rely at times on a
circumstantial, connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes,
Middle Eastern charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups.
Saudi lawyers and supporters say that the links are flimsy and exploit
stereotypes about terrorism, and that the country is being sued because
it has deep pockets and was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

“In
looking at all the evidence the families brought together, I have not
seen one iota of evidence that Saudi Arabia had anything to do with the
9/11 attacks,” Michael Kellogg, a Washington lawyer representing Prince
Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud in the lawsuit, said in an interview. He and
other defense lawyers said that rather than supporting Al Qaeda, the
Saudis were sworn enemies of its leader, Osama bin Laden,
who was exiled from Saudi Arabia, his native country, in 1996. “It’s an
absolute tragedy what happened to them, and I understand their anger,”
Mr. Kellogg said of the victims’ families. “They want to find those
responsible, but I think they’ve been disserved by their lawyers by
bringing claims without any merit against the wrong people.” The Saudi
Embassy in Washington declined to comment. Two federal judges and the
Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630
people represented in the lawsuit, made up of survivors of the attacks
and family members of those killed, throwing out the suit on the ground
that the families cannot bring legal action in the United States against
a sovereign nation and its leaders.

The
Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an
appeal, but the families’ prospects dimmed last month when the Justice
Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the
court not to consider the appeal. The Justice Department said a 1976 law
on sovereign immunity protected the Saudis from liability and noted
that “potentially significant foreign relations consequences” would
arise if such suits were allowed to proceed. “Cases like this put the
U.S. government in an extremely difficult position when it has to make
legal arguments, even when they are the better view of the law, that run
counter to those of terrorist victims,” said John Bellinger, a former
State Department lawyer who was involved in the Saudi litigation.

Senior
Obama administration officials held a private meeting on Monday with
9/11 family members to speak about progress in cracking down on
terrorist financing. Administration officials at the meeting largely
sidestepped questions about the lawsuit, according to participants. But
the official who helped lead the meeting, Stuart A. Levey,
the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has been
outspoken in his criticism of wealthy Saudis, saying they have helped to
finance terrorism. Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in
the lawsuit, they might have difficulty getting some of their new
material into evidence. Some would most likely be challenged on grounds
it was irrelevant or uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to
Saudis who were clearly covered by sovereign immunity. And if the
families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces of evidence
in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One
is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional
inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to
discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the
Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush
declined to do so. Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept. 11
families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said in an
interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama
and victims’ families, the president told her that he was willing to
make the pages public. But she said she had not heard from the White
House since then...

Meet
“the Most Dangerous Islamist on Planet Earth” He lives in Pennsylvania

The
latest documents from Wikileaks shows growing concern among U. S.
officials over Fethullah Gulen’s attempts to create a New Islamic World
and the “braining washing of students” that takes place at his charter
schools within the United States and throughout the Muslim world. The
cable that speaks of the “brain-washing” was written in 2009 by James
Jeffrey, the U. S. Ambassador to Turkey.

In the cable, Mr. Jeffrey describes Gülen
as a “political phenomena” in Turkey even when he resides “in exile”
within a mountain fortress in Pennsylvania. He says the Gülen movement
has gained control of Turkey’s government and dictates Turkish policy
which has become increasing anti-Israeli and anti-American. It points
out that the leaders of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve
Kalkinma or AKP) who now govern Turkey, including Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, appear to serve as Gulen’s
puppets.

Other newly released cables state that Gulen’s disciples
now direct
the country’s 200,000 strong police force - - a force that remains in
conflict with the military, which sees the group as an enemy. In recent
months, Turkish military leaders, and other critics of the
AKP, have been arrested in the dead of night and whisked off to
detention cells. According to NurettinVeren, who served as Fethullah
Gulen’s
right-hand man “There are imam security directors; imams wearing police
uniforms. Many police commissioners get their orders from imams.”

“It is not possible to confirm the Turkish police are under the
control of the Gülen community members, but we have not met anybody who
denies it,” one cable said.

The most dangerous Islamist on planet earth

Gulen has been labeled “the most dangerous Islamist on planet earth,”
although he has failed to attract the attention of U. S.
counter-terrorism experts and the national media. Gülen is a student and follower of Sheikh Sa’id-i Kurdi (1878-1960),
also known as Sa’id-i Nursi, the founder of the Islamist Nur (light)
movement. After Turkey’s war of independence, Kurdi demanded, in an
address to the new parliament, that the new republic be based on Islamic
principles. Kurdi turned against Atatürk and his reforms and against
the new modern, secular, Western republic and Gulen has followed his
militant mentor’s example.

Hailed as an outstanding educator by Graham Fuller and other CIA
officials, the reclusive Gulen is semi-literate and lacks a high school
diploma. In 1999, he was driven from his native Turkey because of his attempts to overthrow the secular Turkish government.

Objectives of transforming Turkey into an Islam republic and of creating a New Islamic World Order

In his sermons, Gulen has stated his objectives of transforming
Turkey into an Islam republic and of creating a New Islamic World Order.
In one sermon, he said:

“You must move in the arteries of the system without
anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers …
until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like
this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads,
and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria,
like in 1982 [in] Syria … like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in
Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you
are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire
world and carry it … You must wait until such time as you have gotten
all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power
of the constitutional institutions in Turkey … Until that time, any step
taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full
forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside.
The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed
my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence … trusting your
loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here—[just] as you
discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the
feelings that I expressed here.

He continued:

When everything was closed and all doors were locked, our
houses of isik [light] assumed a mission greater than that of older
times. In the past, some of the duties of these houses were carried out
by madrasas [Islamic schools], some by schools, some by tekkes [Islamist
lodges] … These isik homes had to be the schools, had to be madrasas,
[had to be] tekkes all at the same time. The permission did not come
from the state, or the state’s laws, or the people who govern us. The
permission was given by God … who wanted His name learned and talked
about, studied, and discussed in those houses, as it used to be in the
mosques.

In another sermon, Gülen proclaimed:

Now it is a painful spring that we live in. A nation is
being born again. A nation of millions [is] being born—one that will
live for long centuries, God willing … It is being born with its own
culture, its own civilization. If giving birth to one person is so
painful, the birth of millions cannot be pain-free. Naturally we will
suffer pain. It won’t be easy for a nation that has accepted atheism,
has accepted materialism, a nation accustomed to running away from
itself, to come back riding on its horse. It will not be easy, but it is
worth all our suffering and the sacrifices.

In 1998, Gulen fled to the U.S. with a small army of followers and
purchased a 45 acre parcel of land in the midst of Pennsylvania’s Pocono
Mountains as a base for his international operations. From this base, Gulen, who has amassed over $25 billion in assets,
continues to direct the activities of the AKP and events throughout
Central Asia and much of the Muslim world. Under his direction, Turkey has transformed from a secular state into
an Islamic country with 85,000 active mosques - - one for every 350-
citizens - - the highest number per capita in the world, 90,000 imams,
more imams than teachers and physicians - - and thousands of state-run
Islamic schools.

Turkey, thanks to Gulen and his disciples, has transferred its alliance from Europe and the United States to Russia and Iran

Despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Turkey, thanks to
Gulen and his disciples, has transferred its alliance from Europe and
the United States to Russia and Iran. It has moved toward friendship
with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria and created a pervasive anti-Christian,
anti-Jewish, and anti-America animus throughout the populace.

Gulen has also established thousands of schools throughout
central Asia and Europe. According to Bayram Balci, a Turkish scholar,
the Gulen schools seek to expand “the Islamization of Turkish nationality and the Turification
of Islam” in order to bring about a universal caliphate ruled by
Islamic law. Because of their subversive nature of these institutions,
these schools have been outlawed in Russia and Uzbekistan.

Even the Netherlands, a nation that embraces pluralism and tolerance,
has opted to cut funding to the Gulen schools because of their imminent
threat to the social order. But Gulen’s 140-plus schools in the United States which advance the
establishment of a New Islamic World Order have received little national
attention.

These schools bear such innocuous names as the Magnolia
School, the
Beehive Academy, the Sonoran Science Academy, the Lotus School for
Excellence, and the Pacific Technology School. All of these schools are
funded by U.S. taxpayers. Want to know more about Gulen, his plans for
your children, and the growing threat?

Paul L. Williams, Ph.D., is the author of such best-selling books as The Day of Islam, The Al Qaeda Connection, Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Crusades and The Vatican Exposed.
An award-winning journalist, he is a frequent guest on such national
news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR.

The
Western media has played a central role in obfuscating the nature
of foreign interference in Syria including outside support to armed
insurgents. In chorus they have described recent events in Syria as a
"peaceful protest movement" directed against the government of
Bashar Al Assad. Recent developments in Syria point to a full-fledged
armed insurgency, integrated by Islamist "freedom fighters",
supported, trained and equipped by NATO and Turkey's High Command.
According to Israeli intelligence sources:

NATO
headquarters in Brussels and the Turkish high command are meanwhile
drawing up plans for their first military step in Syria, which is
to arm the rebels with weapons for combating the tanks and
helicopters spearheading the Assad regime's crackdown on dissent. Instead of repeating the Libyan model of air strikes, NATO
strategists are thinking more in terms of pouring large quantities
of anti-tank and anti-air rockets, mortars and heavy machine guns
into the protest centers for beating back the government armored
forces. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011)

The
delivery of weapons to the rebels is to be implemented "overland,
namely through Turkey and under Turkish army
protection....Alternatively, the arms would be trucked into Syria under Turkish military guard and transferred to rebel leaders at pre-arranged rendez-vous." (Ibid,
emphasis added) NATO and the Turkish High command, also contemplate
the development of a jihad involving the recruitment of thousands of
freedom fighters, reminiscent of the enlistment of Mujahideen to
wage the CIA's jihad (holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan
war:

Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a
campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East
countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels.
The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure
their passage into Syria. (Ibid, emphasis added)

These
various developments point towards the possible involvement of
Turkish troops inside Syria, which could potentially lead to a broader
military confrontation between the two countries, as well as a
full-fledged "humanitarian" military intervention by NATO, which would
be carried out in coordination with the Alliance's support to the
insurgency.

The
Arabic website "Al-Rai Al-Arabi" has reported that some 600 Libyan
"volunteers", who want to participate in the overthrow of President
Bashar al-Assad, came to Syria through Turkey. The site indicated a
representative of the current leadership of Libya as its source. This
is not too surprising; the current Transitional National Council (TNC)
was the first to recognize the Syrian National Council as the "sole
legitimate representative" of the Syrian people. The "Free Syrian Army"
(FSA) in part of a group affiliated with the Libyan rebel movement,
which have been linked in the past to Islamic extremist’s organizations
and al-Qaida of the Islamic Mahgred (AQIM). See story: "Libyan rebel
commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links"

CIA
spies have met Syrian rebels to discuss their required weapons,
military strategies and the “dirty war” that the insurgents are fighting
supported by the US, Britain and France, says an analyst. The comment comes as according to a New York Times
report published on Thursday, some US and Arab intelligence officials
say a group of “CIA officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey”
and that the agents are helping the anti-Syria governments decide
which gangs inside the Arab country will “receive arms to fight the
Syrian government.” “CIA officers are there and they are trying to
make new sources and recruit people,” said one of the Arab officials,
whose name was not mentioned in the report.

The
arms include automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition
and antitank weapons, which are being transported “mostly across the
Turkish border,” the report said. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar pay
for the transport of the weaponry into Syria, according to the US and
Arab intelligence officials cited in the report. The CIA spies have
been in southern Turkey for the past several weeks and Washington is
also considering providing the armed gangs with “satellite imagery and
other detailed intelligence on Syrian troop locations and movements,”
the report adds.

This
as Syria has been the scene of violence since March 2011. Many people,
including security forces, have lost their lives in the unrest. The
West and the Syrian opposition accuse the government of killing the
protesters. But Damascus blames ''outlaws, saboteurs and armed
terrorist groups'' for the unrest, stating that it is being orchestrated
from abroad. Press TV has conducted an interview with political
commentator, Sukant Chandan, to further shed light on the issue. What
follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV:
Sukant Chandan, how do you explain claims of “diplomacy” from the
United States when it comes to Kofi Anan’s peace plan but then reports
like the one in the New York Times surfaces pointing to the CIA
in addition to Washington’s allies in the region for aiding armed
groups fighting the Syrian government. Does the US have any interest to
support Anan’s peace plan or is the claim sort of a political ploy?

Chandan:
The Western white power structure has one aim which is to conduct
regime change against any state in the Global South which poses any
type of obstacle to its total domination of the world. I
mean it’s high time that the empire admitted through the New York
Times that the CIA officers have been directing and arming the Syrian
rebels which, you know, let’s be honest with ourselves if anyone
understands a little bit of the nature of the West we know that they’re
up to this all the time and we don’t need them to admit it.

But
once they’ve admitted it, we know that they’ve been up to this for a
long, long time when the former US ambassador Mr. Ford - for Syria that
is- was on the demonstrations when this rebellion first took place in
the first days and weeks. Who
is Mr. Ford; Mr. Ford is the protégé of Mr. Negroponte. Who is
Negroponte; he is the arch designer of the contra dirty war in Latin
America.

So
when Mr. Ford has been meeting the rebels and CIA officers are meeting
the rebels, they’re discussing what type of weapons to give the rebels
and what type of military strategy to conduct and knowing the type of
dirty war that these people get up to we know that the United States
along with Britain and France are encouraging and probably training
[the rebels].

Don’t
forget it was in Scotland that the British state trained the Mujahidin
to fight the Soviets and the [People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan] PDPA government back in the 80s fast forward to today
we’re seeing a tragic rerun of a similar type of dynamic that took
place in Afghanistan today in Syria, where you have a state backed by
the Global South, particularly Russia and China that’s supporting Syria
on the other hand you have imperialism arming and training and
financing these terrorists for regime change.

So
it’s all in the open and no one should be confused about the
situation, it’s all very clear you have a clear polarization of forces,
on the one hand you have the empire, the Western white power structure
whatever you want to call it allied directly with Turkey, Qatar and
Saudi Arabia and the state of Israel.

Don’t
forget Shimon Peres himself said just very recently, a few days ago
that he would wish that the Syrian rebels would win. So on one side you
have these forces on the other side you have the forces for
independence and progress for the people of the world, led by Russia and
China and the Syrian government and their allies. So
the situation is very clear and I’m really quite disturbed by how too
many people out there are still befuddled or taking this nonsensical
third way or neutral position as [South African activist and retired
Anglican bishop] Desmond Tutu said and he’s not my favorite progressive
character but as he said if you’re neutral in a situation of
oppression then you’re siding with the oppressor and that’s what’s
going on.Press TV:
Let’s go back to our guest in London Mr. Chandan you were shaking your
head there when Mr. Korb was giving his answer let’s relate one of his
talks to you. Do you agree first of all with Mr. Korb that the United
States is trying to prevent arms from reaching al Qaeda forces if they
are in Syria and add anything if you have to the comments made by Mr.
Korb.

Chandan:
It’s incredible how history developed. I mean our friend from the
United States is either so naive to not understand the system of
governance and world domination of his government or he is a trickster
frankly. I mean now today you
can become a Jihadist and go fight against the Syrian regime or against
Gaddafi’s regime yesterday and you’ll be promoted and celebrated in
the mainstream media in the West. It’s all very clear what’s going on. I
mean you know the United States and Britain and France are constantly
conducting covert regime change against the whole Global South.

This is what the state of the West is all about. Just
recently today you can read how the United States is putting pressure
on stopping a report showing a report that Rwanda, its proxy in Africa,
is involved in destabilization against the Democratic Republic of
Congo which if Congo becomes independent in alliance with China will
lift Africa and smash US domination and British domination in that
region. So it’s clear what the
nature of this state is all about. I mean again the way the West is
dealing with al Qaeda is very interesting, because it’s obviously
purging al Qaeda of those elements which it sees too problematic to its
interests and then promoting other elements of al Qaeda.Al
Qaeda is very active in Libya and they always have been since the
beginning of the uprising and before when the Libyan Islamic fighting
group was one of the main organizations supported by the CIA and the MI6
and the French intelligent service against Gaddafi’s regime. It’s
all on record. It’s all on the open and it’s very important that our
people raise their voices, organize themselves and are really rigorous
and assertive in struggling for peace and development of the countries
of the Global South.

Press TV:
Mr. Chandan in London some observers critical of Turkey‘s role in
Syria are saying that it is acting as a proxy for the US and NATO. How
do you perceive that and in addition to that do you have anything to
add to what Mr. Korb just said?

Chandan:
In response to Mr. Korb it’s a typical strategy of the white man to
project all issues of oppression that’s actually coming from the White
power structure onto the natives and onto the brown and black people i.
e. you know the white power structure is absolutely, you know,
innocent of any wrong doing and it’s these silly Africans and these
silly Asians and these silly Arabs who are creating all the mess and
all the problems.

The
interesting thing in that regard with Libya and now with Syria is that
the West don’t want to put any of their boots officially on the ground
but obviously in the first days of the Libyan uprising the British SAS
were in Benghazi and they got sprung because the telephone
conversation between the former British ambassador to Libya and the
head of the NTC their phone conversation was exposed by Gaddafi’s
regime and similarly in Syria.

They
don’t want to put official boots on the ground in Syria so they are
sending covert agents to do all the dirty work because they want to
give the impression to the rest of the world: hey we’re the good guys
and if any dirty business is going on it’s these crazy natives and on
the issue of the Arab Spring as well that this befuddling of minds about
what to lose in Egypt is all about. Tunisia
has broken relations with the Asad regime and the Muslim Brotherhood
which it seems to be in the ascendancy for the time being is against
the Assad regime. Their comrades in Syria are absolutely involved in the insurgency against the Assad regime there.

On
the issue of Turkey, it’s a similar thing actually and it’s a great
shame that the Turkish state has strategically decided not to side with
the Global South but it sees its interests for the time being and it’s
a very narrow strategy that it’s employing and it’s going to go
nowhere because, you know, anyone who dances with the devil will find
that the devil will stab them in the back in the not too distant
future. So really it’s not even in Turkey’s national interest to go
along with NATO as it did with Libya and now with Syria...

Press TV:
You seemed a bit anxious there to get a response to what Mr. Korb was
saying please go ahead with that and also do you think that with so
many external factors, this can be a Syrian-led effort to end the
unrest?

Chandan:
It’s amazing. I don’t know what world Mr. Korb is living in. You know
the Americans don’t want to get involved with anyone; the British don’t
want to get involved.

Korb: Wait a second I don’t attack you personally...I’m living in the real world, you’re not. Don’t attack me personally.

Chandan:...the
establishments in Britain, France and the United States are constantly
planning wars. Mr. Corb himself constantly talked about the pivot to
Asia. Is that not a war plan? Of course it’s a war plan. I mean it’s
total nonsense what Mr. Korb is coming out with but. But in terms of
the internal Syrian situation we need to- I’ve said many times before,
I’ll say it again, the Global South needs to assert itself and take the
initiative. We lost Libya- that
was devastating. We didn’t take enough initiatives, meaningful
initiatives whereas Latin America- I’m loyal to all of our Global South
and Latin America politically is the most advanced. It needs to be
making moves to rediscover the regime change...

The U.S.-led attack on Libya is an American operation of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), planned and initiated long before any
“protests” started in Libya this February. Under the guise of “protecting innocent civilians,” the U.S.
military, Africom, NATO, and the United Nations are now bombing Libya,
raining destruction upon the Libyan economic and military infrastructure
and killing untold numbers of innocent Africans. Here are just 10 of
the many obvious reasons why this so-called “spontaneous” protest was from beginning to end another CIA operation.

1. The United States' motives are suspect. The “humanitarian” concern expressed by the American government has not taken long to evaporate. The claim that Col. Muammar Gadhafi
was “slaughtering his own people” cannot be substantiated by any
independent evidence, and no “journalists” are even asking for evidence.
The White House's policy advisor and Israeli lobby official Dennis Ross
claimed that “up to 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone
would blame us for it.” Ross has produced no proof of a massacre—and
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen both confirmed, “We've seen no confirmation whatsoever.” Russian military has been monitoring the unrest via satellite from the very beginning, and they say that the claimed “slaughter” is imaginary. CIA √

2. The world media have shown a shocking lack of curiosity. Just as with the U.S. debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan, the New York Times leads a coordinated campaign of propaganda, rumor-mongering, and the demonization of Muammar Gadhafi.
Some articles appear to be written in advance and closely follow the
prescription of the Washington consulting firm Wirthlin Group, which
determined that “the message most likely to motivate public support for
war on Iraq was the perception of Saddam Hussein as an evil madman who
even committed atrocities against his own people and had to be stopped.”
The major media's appetite for this “killing-his-own-people” line is
textbook CIA propaganda and belies the fact that they are at this very
hour operating from a swank hotel that is under Gadhafi's total control
in Tripoli. Even though they continue to spread unsubstantiated “rapes”
and “cluster bombings,” and “fears of massacres,” and child-targeting,
these “journalists” don't appear to be frightened for their lives. CIA √

3. The “rebels” are Al-Qaeda. When Col. Gadhafi first claimed that the rebels were members of Al-Qaeda, no one believed him. But according to a 2007 report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point titled “Al-Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters In Iraq,” eastern Libya—the very center of the current uprising—is a well-known Al-Qaeda
stronghold. The same people the U.S. is fighting three wars to destroy
are the “rebels” the U.S. is protecting, supplying, training, and
attempting to install into power in Libya. And if the West Point
military analysts knew this to be true in 2007, why did they not bomb
those Al-Qaeda strongholds in the way they are bombing Gadhafi's forces now? CIA √

4. Rebel “leaders” are CIA agents. The “rebel” leader, a man named Khalifa Hifter,
left the Libyan government and set up his own militia financed by the
CIA. He then spent two decades living within minutes of CIA headquarters
in Langley, Virginia, where, according to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, he had
no apparent source of income. Shortly after the 2011 “protests” began,
the CIA airlifted him into Benghazi and told the press to start calling
him the “leader” of the rebels. CIA √

5. The Libyan uprising is not “spontaneous.”The incident that
allegedly spurred the Libyan “rebellion” was the arrest of an activist
lawyer on February 15, 2011. This ignited a wave of protests that
spilled over onto the

Internet and other media. But an unusually large number of YOUTUBE videos and TWITTER messages
have emerged that are suspiciously similar and seem to be a product of
the Pentagon's recently uncovered project to develop software that
allows it to secretly manipulate social media sites to influence
Internet conversations and spread propaganda. These suspicious “free
Libya” sites all claim to be homegrown, but YOUTUBE and other social
media sites cannot be accessed by Internet users in Libya. The
“revolution” websites are all in English even though the language of
Libya is Arabic, with English rarely spoken and only in the big cities.
Despite their dubious origins, professional media groups like CNN, BBC,
NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox News, and Al Jazeera have amplified these anonymous
and uncorroborated video postings as legitimate news sources.

And some of the “spontaneous” websites are clearly fraudulent. One that calls itself “LIBYAN REVOLUTIONARY CENTRAL” (http://www.feb17.info/) was created on February 14—A DAY BEFORE the original protest. And the website is registered in Ohio as a non-profit organization with a 501c3 tax exempt ID number!CIA √

6a. Whites are desperate for Libyan oil. America and Europe
are dependent on the type of oil that is only found in Libya. It is a
very high quality “sweet” oil with low sulfur content. Europe's
refineries cannot process other types of high sulfur oil, so when
Gadhafi recently suggested he could find better customers for Libyan oil
in India, China, and Russia, it made Europe desperate for an immediate Libyan “uprising.” CIA √

6b. New oil infrastructure already in place. Only days after
the “spontaneous” protests the “rebels,” who were mostly seen in grainy
cell phone videos chanting slogans and waving banners, had organized
themselves into a sophisticated corporate entity and announced their
formation and launching of the “Libyan Oil Company” to supervise oil
production for all of Libya, and their creation of the “Central Bank of
Benghazi” as a monetary authority. The French government instantaneously
recognized these new business entities formed by “the rebels” even
though it was still publicly wondering who the rebel leaders were. CIA √

7. CIA history in Libya. The CIA has a LONG documented history
of attempts to overthrow Col. Gadhafi. At least four major CIA
operations, some in partnership with the Israeli Mossad, have been
conducted since 1972. Gadhafi's use of oil revenues to organize and
uplift Africa from its colonial destruction is EXACTLY the opposite of
America's foreign policy, which has always sought to strip Africa of its
raw resources to enrich the multinational corporations. Col. Gadhafi
has invested billions of dollars in projects to help emerging African
countries become independent. He has worked to establish a “United
States of Africa”—an effort to unite Africa to finally overcome the
damage caused by centuries of European colonialism. It was Gadhafi who
drove the African Union's efforts toward a single African Parliament, a
single currency, and a single army. The CIA has no other function than
to stop this kind of Black unity and progress.CIA √

8. Libyan invasion planned prior to 9/11.
In a 2007 filmed interview, 4-star United States Army Gen. Wesley Clark
discussed a Pentagon memo under Donald Rumsfeld that, in his words,
“describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years,
starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” CIA √

9. The U.S. companies in Libya are invisible. Many U.S.
corporations that have been, are now, and will continue to do business
in Libya are UNDER NO PRESSURE to leave or “give back” their profits, or
alter their business activity with Gadhafi's so-called “murderous
regime.” Curiously, they have achieved a status different from that of
The Hon. Min. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, which also had a
business relationship with Libya—but for comparatively infinitesimal
sums. The U.S. companies in Libya whose Libyan business arrangements
have yet to be questioned are many, and include:

In reality, the CIA works for the multinational corporations to tenaciously protect their world interests. CIA√

10. Rape is charged. A distraught, English-speaking,
Arab woman fortuitously finds her way from days of gang rape by
Gadhafi's soldiers into the only hotel in Tripoli where foreign
journalists are encamped (apparently dropped off by her tormentors)
where she reports of her ordeal to the gathered media who immediately,
unquestioningly, broadcast the brutal crime to the world as proven fact.
She claimed that she was detained at a checkpoint, tied up, abused,
then led away to be gang raped—all whilst her assailants were defending
Tripoli against a Western bombing campaign. “They defecated and urinated
on me and tied me up,” she said, her face streaming with tears. “They
violated my honor, look at what the Gadhafi militiamen did to me.”

Everybody who heard this woman's claims—except 100 percent of the
Western media—immediately remembered October 1990, when a sobbing
15-year-old Kuwaiti girl gave unsworn testimony in a
Congressional hearing chaired by Zionist congressman Thomas Lantos in
which she described what she saw in a Kuwaiti hospital with her own
eyes: “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the
hospital with guns, and go into the room where … babies were in
incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the
incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

The
girl was actually the daughter of a Kuwaiti ambassador, and had been
coached by the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton to give
false testimony. Three months passed between the hearing and the start
of the first Gulf War during which the fabricated incubator story was
repeated over and over again by seven U.S. senators and ten times by
President G.H.W. Bush himself. It was recited as fact in congressional
testimony, on TV and radio talk shows like Nightline, and at the
UN Security Council. It is cited as the single most persuasive reason
that the American public backed the first Iraq War. None of those
involved with the hoax have ever faced legal reprisals.CIA √

The number ten is arbitrary, and does not represent the full extent
of possibly the most brazen CIA overthrow attempt in their long and
murderous history. That which drives the entire Western industrial
infrastructure—petroleum oil—is the only thing on the minds of the
charlatan leaders of the West, and the world watches in horrified awe as
each blunder they make is exposed to the light in almost real time. The
poor Libyan people and their revolutionary African champion Muammar
Gadhafi are under severe assault by the very same people who only
yesterday assured him he was their partner and friend. It is a
6,000-year-old history of tricks and deceptions that The Most Honorable
Elijah Muhammad taught us about, and it has now run its course and is
bringing a well-deserved demise to Western rule.

For more than five years, Abu
Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed
Hamuda bin Qumu was a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay prison, judged “a probable member of Al Qaeda”
by the analysts there. They concluded in a newly disclosed 2005
assessment that his release would represent a “medium to high risk, as
he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.”
Today, Mr. Qumu, 51, is a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to
oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi,
reportedly a leader of a ragtag band of fighters known as the Darnah
Brigade for his birthplace, this shabby port town of 100,000 people in
northeast Libya. The former enemy and prisoner of the United States
is now an ally of sorts, a remarkable turnabout resulting from
shifting American policies rather than any obvious change in Mr. Qumu.

He was a tank driver in the Libyan Army in the 1980s, when the Central Intelligence Agency
was spending billions to support religious militants trying to drive
Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. Mr. Qumu moved to Afghanistan in the
early 1990s, just as Osama bin Laden
and other former mujahedeen were violently turning against their
former benefactor, the United States. He was captured in Pakistan after
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, accused of being a member of
the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and sent to Guantánamo —
in part because of information provided by Colonel Qaddafi’s
government.

“The Libyan
Government considers detainee a ‘dangerous man with no qualms about
committing terrorist acts,’ ” says the classified 2005 assessment,
evidently quoting Libyan intelligence findings, which was obtained by
The New York Times. “ ‘He was known as one of the extremist commanders
of the Afghan Arabs,’ ” the Libyan information continues, referring
to Arab fighters who remained in Afghanistan after the anti-Soviet
jihad.

When
that Guantánamo assessment was written, the United States was working
closely with Colonel Qaddafi’s intelligence service against
terrorism. Now, the United States is a leader of the international
coalition trying to oust Colonel Qaddafi — and is backing with air
power the rebels, including Mr. Qumu. The classified Guantánamo
assessment of Mr. Qumu claims that he suffered from “a non-specific
personality disorder” and recounted — again citing the Libyan
government as its source — a history of drug addiction and drug
dealing and accusations of murder and armed assault.

In 1993, the document asserts, Mr. Qumu escaped from a Libyan prison,
fled to Egypt and went on to Afghanistan, training at a camp run by
Mr. bin Laden. At Guantánamo, Mr. Qumu denied knowledge of terrorist
activities. He said he feared being returned to Libya, where he faced
criminal charges, and asked to go to some other country where “You (the
United States) can watch me,” according to a hearing summary.
Nonetheless, in 2007, he was sent from Guantánamo to Libya and released
the next year in an amnesty for militants.

Colonel Qaddafi has cited claims about Mr. Qumu’s past in statements
blaming Al Qaeda for the entire Libyan uprising. American officials
have nervously noted the presence of at least a few former militants
in the rebels’ ranks. The walls of buildings along the road into
Darnah are decorated with the usual anti-Qaddafi and pro-Western
slogans, in English and Arabic, found all over eastern Libya. But
there are notable additions: “No Qaeda” and “No to Extremism.”

Darnah has reason to be touchy. The town has a long history of Islamic
militancy, including a revolt against Colonel Qaddafi’s rule led by
Islamists in the mid-1990s that resulted in a vicious crackdown.
Activists from here are credited with starting the Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group, which later announced that it was affiliating with Al
Qaeda, and which sent militants like Mr. Qumu to fight in Afghanistan.

Most
famously, though, Darnah has a claim to being the world’s most
productive recruiting ground for suicide bombers. An analysis of 600
suicide bombers in Iraq by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
found that of 440 who listed their hometowns in a recruiting roster,
52 were from Darnah, the most of any city, with Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
40 times as populous, as the next biggest source, sending 51.

In
addition to Mr. Qumu, local residents say the Darnah Brigade is led
by Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, another Libyan thought to be a militant who
was in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s
rule, when Al Qaeda had training camps there. Mr. Qumu did not turn up
for a promised interview last week, but Mr. Hasadi did, in crumpled
fatigues with a light beard and a lazy left eye, perpetually
half-closed. He denied that Mr. Qumu was in his group, recently renamed
the Martyrs of Abu Salim Brigade, after a prison in Tripoli where
1,200 inmates were slaughtered in 1996. Two of Mr. Qumu’s sons are in
his brigade, he said.

“I don’t know how to convince everyone that we are not Al Qaeda here,”
Mr. Hasadi said. “Our aim is to topple Qaddafi,” he added. “I know
that you will never believe me, but it is true.”

For now, Western observers in Benghazi, the temporary rebel capital
180 miles from here, seem content to accept those assurances. “We’re
more worried about Al Qaeda infiltration from outside than the
indigenous ones” one said. “Most of them have a local agenda so they
don’t present as much as a threat to the West.” Rod Nordland reported
from Darnah, and Scott Shane from Washington. Kareem Fahim contributed
reporting from Benghazi, Libya.

Abdel-Hakim Belhaj
is an
emerging
hero of the Libyan uprising, the man who led the Tripoli Brigade that
swept into the capital and captured the fortified compound that was
Moammar Gadhafi's seat of power. He's also the former leader of an
Islamic militant group who says he was tortured by CIA agents at a
secret prison.

Belhaj, the
rebels' commander in Tripoli, said Friday that the U.S. wrongly lumped
him in with terrorists after Sept. 11, but that he holds no grudge. He
said he shares the West's goal of a free Libya. "We
call and hope for a civil country that is ruled by the law which we
were not allowed to enjoy under Gadhafi," he told The Associated Press.
"The identity of the country will be left up to the people to choose."

He
was not always so inclusive. In a 1996 statement he wrote as leader of
the now-dissolved Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Belhaj wrote a
statement vowing to fight "all the deviant groups that call for
democracy or fight for the sake of it." Though
Belhaj and many others who resisted Gadhafi for decades considered
their fight an Islamic cause, both secular and religious Libyans took
part in the uprising that led to Gadhafi's downfall. Secular Libyans and
the West are hoping Belhaj's actions match what he told the Libyan
people minutes after arriving at Gadhafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound Aug.
23.

"You are facing a historic moment; a responsibility in front
of God and the world, to protect and preserve the security of your
country. To have justice, equality and welfare," he told Al-Jazeera. "We
have to unite and join the ranks to build the country."

Belhaj
has the support of the leader of the rebels' National Transitional
Council, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil. Trading his army fatigues for a business
suit, Belhaj accompanied Abdul-Jalil on a trip to Qatar, where on Monday
they urged NATO representatives and Western officials to extend NATO
operations to protect civilians from the remnants of Gadhafi's regime
that continue to fight. The next
day in the rebels' temporary capital of Benghazi, Abdul-Jalil pointed
to that conference as evidence that Belhaj is someone the council can
trust. "He doesn't pose a threat to the world's safety," he said.

The
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group was not a monolithic entity, explained
one U.S. official familiar with the group. Some branches have had
connections with al-Qaida in Sudan, Afghanistan or Pakistan, but others
dropped any relationship with al-Qaida entirely. Belhaj led a faction
that disavowed al-Qaida and declared its commitment to establishing a
democracy in Libya, the official said, speaking on condition of
anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

But U.S. officials are "watching to see whether or not this is for real, or just for show," the official said. Belhaj, 45, is a soft-spoken man with a thick black beard. The father of two boys is shy when speaking to female journalists. In an interview at his headquarters at the sprawling military airport in central Tripoli, Belhaj played down his Islamist ties. "We never have and never will support what they call terrorism," he said.

Belhaj
was a civil engineering student and Gadhafi opponent when he fled Libya
and went to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. He later joined the U.S.-backed
resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, fighting alongside
militants who would go on to form al-Qaida. He said members of the
terror group asked him to join, but he refused because he disagreed
with its ideology of global jihad, or holy war, and wanted to focus on
ridding Libya of Gadhafi.

Belhaj's 1996 statement revealed
differences with al-Qaida on the issue of targeting civilians. Though he
decried neighboring Algeria's regime as "infidel," he heavily
criticized Islamic militants there for "massacres of civilians, women,
children and elders."

Belhaj returned to Libya in the 1990s and
led the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in fierce confrontations with
Gadhafi's regime. He said that after fleeing Libya in the mid-1990s, he
moved from country to country until 2004, when he was picked up and
renditioned to Thailand, where he claims he was tortured by the CIA. "It
was a very bad treatment. The whole time I was blindfolded, I was hung
from the wall, and they would beat me on my back, the way they tied me
up was extremely painful and difficult to bear," he said.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood declined to comment on Belhaj's claims. Belhaj said he believes his detention was in reaction to what he called the "tragic events of 9/11." "The
U.S. administration ... lumped a lot of Islamic groups and charities
under the label of terrorist and it seems we also entered under this
category," he said. "Now everyone is aware that our work was not of a
terrorist nature."

As for those he accuses of torture, he said,
"Revenge doesn't motivate me personally." But he added that he was
considering court action. Belhaj said that after being tortured,
he was sent to Libya's Abu Salim prison, where Gadhafi's regime held
many political prisoners. The Libya government freed Belhaj and 33
other members of the Islamic Fighting Group in March 2010. He agreed to
renounce violence as part of an initiative by Gadhafi's son Seif
al-Islam, who at the time was considered a reformist voice.

Soon after the uprising against Gadhafi broke out in mid-February, Belhaj began training fighters in the western mountains. National
Transitional Council Abdel-Hafiz Ghoga said that with Gadhafi's
downfall, secular and religious Libyans "all share a common goal, a
modern democratic civic state." "Libyans will not allow anyone to replace Gadhafi's dictatorship with any other dictatorships," he said.

Islamic
militants, however, have raised concerns within and outside Libya. The
July assassination of NTC military chief Abdel-Fattah Younis was linked
to an Islamic extremist group led by Obaida bin Jarrah, though motives
are not known. In the days after
the rebels swept into Libya Aug. 20, Abdul-Jalil lashed out at Islamic
extremists who he said tried to kill Gadhafi's son Mohammed, who had
been under house arrest but ended up escaping. Abdul-Jalil threatened to
resign if "extremist elements" didn't abide by the NTC's general
policies.

WikiLeaks
cables, independent analysts and reporters have all identified supporters of
Islamist causes among the opposition to Col Gaddafi's regime, particularly
in the towns of Benghazi and Dernah. An al-Qaeda leader of Libyan
origin, Abu Yahya al-Libi, released a statement backing the insurrection a
week ago, while Yusuf Qaradawi, the Qatar-based, Muslim Brotherhood-linked
theologian issued a fatwa authorising Col Gaddafi's military entourage to
assassinate him.

But they also agree that the leading roles in the revolution are played by a
similar cross-section of society as that in Egypt
next door – liberals, nationalists, those with personal experience of regime
brutality and Islamists who subscribe to democratic principles. The WikiLeaks cables, initially revealed by The Daily Telegraph and dating
from 2008, identified Dernah in particular as a breeding ground for fighters
in a number of causes, including Afghanistan
and Iraq.

"The unemployed, disfranchised young men of eastern Libya have nothing to
lose and are therefore willing to sacrifice themselves for something greater
than themselves by engaging in extremism in the name of religion," the
cables quoted a Dernah businessman as saying.

Col Gaddafi has pinpointed the rebels in Dernah as being led by an al-Qaeda
cell that has declared the town an Islamic emirate. The regime also casts
blame on hundreds of members of the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group released
since the group renounced violence two years ago.

Although said by the regime to be affiliated to al-Qaeda, most
LIFG members
have focused only on promoting sharia law in Libya, rejecting a
worldwide "jihad". The man running Dernah's defences, Abdelkarim
al-Hasadi, was arrested by US
forces in Afghanistan in 2002, but says he does not support a
Taliban-like
state.The rebels' political leadership there says it is secular. The
same goes for the wider leadership, whose membership claims to espouse
largely liberal ideals.

In any future negotiations – should it come to dialogue or even victory –
rebel spokesmen are likely to be politicians who were until recently senior
figures in the regime itself. The head of the opposition National Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil was Col
Gaddafi's justice minister until he defected at the start of the uprising.

That may not be as bad as it sounds – he was a law professor appointed to
improve Libya's human rights record by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi when the
colonel's son was leading Libya's westernisation drive, and had already
clashed with longer-standing regime insiders. The military chief, though, is Abdul Fattah Younis al-Obeidi, a former leader
of Col Gaddafi's special forces who was his public security, or interior,
minister until he went over to the rebels.

He has described Col Gaddafi as "not completely sane", and worked
with the SAS during the now curtailed thaw in British-Libyan relations. But
it is still ironic that the West is taking sides in a battle between the
leader of a much hated regime and his former effective deputy.

The "Liberation" of Libya: NATO Special Forces and Al Qaeda Join Hands

"Former Terrorists" Join the "Pro-democracy" Bandwagon. Extensive war crimes have been committed. NATO has blood on its hands

The
"pro-democracy" rebels are led by Al Qaeda paramilitary brigades under
the supervision of NATO Special Forces. The "Liberation" of Tripoli
was carried out by "former" members of the Libya Islamic Fighting Group
(LIFG). The jihadists and NATO work hand in glove. These "former" Al
Qaeda affiliated brigades constitute the backbone of the
"pro-democracy" rebellion.

NATO
special forces with "boots and the ground" pass unnoticed. Their
identity is not known or revealed. They blend into the Libyan rebellion
landscape of machine guns and pickup trucks. They are not highlighted
in the photo ops. Special forces composed of US Navy SEALS, British
Special SAS Forces and French legionnaires, disguised in civilian rebel
garb, are reported to be behind major operations directed against key
government buildings including Gadhafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound in
central Tripoli.

Reports
confirm that British SAS were on the ground in Eastern Libya prior to
the onset of the air campaign. Special Forces are in close coordination
with NATO air operations. "Highly-trained units, known as ‘Smash’
teams for their prowess and destructive ability, have carried out
secret reconnaissance missions to provide up-to-date information on the
Libyan armed forces." (SAS 'Smash' squads on the ground in Libya to mark targets for coalition jets, Daily Mirror, March 21, 2011)

NATO
special forces and the CIA sponsored Islamic brigades under the
command of "former" jihadists constitute the backbone of combat
capabilities on the ground, supported by the air campaign, which now
includes Apache helicopter raids. The remainder of the rebel forces
include untrained trigger happy gunmen (including teenagers) (see photo
below), which serve the function of creating an atmosphere of panic
and intimidation. What we are dealing with is a carefully planned
military intelligence operation to invade and occupy a sovereign
country.

The
Central Intelligence Agency of the United States recruited over 1,500
men from Mazar-e-Sharif for fighting against the Qaddafi forces in
Libya. Sources told TheNation: “Most of the men have been recruited
from Afghanistan. They are Uzbeks, Persians and Hazaras. According to
the footage, these men attired in Uzbek-style of shalwar and
Hazara-Uzbek Kurta were found fighting in Libyan cities.”

When Al-Jazeera reporter
pointed it he was disallowed by the ‘rebels ‘to capture images. Sources
in Quetta said: “Some Uzbeks and Hazaras from Afghanistan were
arrested in Balochistan for illegally traveling into Pakistan en route
to Libya through Iran. Aljazeera’s report gave credence to this
story. More than 60 Afghans, mainly children and teenagers, have been
found dead after suffocating inside a shipping container in
southwestern Pakistan in an apparent human smuggling attempt.

More than 100 illegal immigrants were discovered 20km from the
border town of Quetta last week inside the container, which had been
locked from the outside. Aljazeera having dubious record gave human
touch to this story as most of the men who intruded inside Pakistan
from Afghanistan were recruits for Libyan Rebels’ Force. The sources
said: “The CIA funded Libyan Rebels with cash and weapons.” In a
report the New York Mayor’s TV Channel Bloomberg said, “Leaders of the
Libyan rebels’ Transitional National Council flew to Istanbul seeking
legitimacy and money. They will leave with the official recognition of
the US and 31 other nations. As for the cash, they will have to wait.

The decision to treat the council as the “legitimate governing
authority” in Libya is a key step to freeing up some of the
government’s frozen assets for rebels seeking the ouster of Muammar
Qaddafi. Still, obstacles such as existing United Nations sanctions
won’t disappear overnight. “We still have to work through various
legal issues, but we expect this recognition will allow the TNC to
access various forms of funding,” said US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton. At stake are about $34 billion in frozen Libyan government
assets that are held by the US institutions and as much as $130
billion more held around the world. Speaking via phone from Istanbul,
Transitional National Council spokesman Mahmoud Shammam put the total
in excess of $100 billion globally.

Qaddafi, in an audio message broadcast to supporters in the town
of Zlitan, said the Libyan people “will never give up” in the fight to
prevent him being ousted, the Associated Press reported. “The Libyan
people will persevere,” he said. In the coming weeks, the US
officials will consult with the TNC and international partners on the
most effective and appropriate method of making additional significant
financial assistance available, according to a Treasury official who
was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly.

Shammam said the TNC needs $3 billion to cover the budget for six
months. The council is seeking loans secured by the Qaddafi regime’s
assets abroad as a means of funding, he said. Recognition may
lawfully allow nations to buy state-owned oil from the TNC, which
controls the oil-rich eastern part of the country. Italy’s Eni SpA and
France’s Total SA are the top oil companies operating in Libya, a
former Italian colony. How much money the Benghazi-based government can get, and when, may be more tied to politics than the law.

“The legal issues are in the eye of the beholder,” said Gary Clyde
Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International
Economics in Washington. “If Obama and Clinton want to go slow in
paying out the money, their lawyers can invent plenty of legal issues
to justify the chosen pace.”

The US envisions a “short timeframe” for releasing some of the
Libyan government assets frozen by the US, State Department spokesman
Mark Toner said. President Barack Obama signed an order on February 25
freezing any US assets of Muammar Qaddafi, his family and members of
his regime in Libya. As a practical matter, most of the frozen $34
billion is tied up in complicated property interests, including
ownership interests in non-publicly traded companies or real estate,
according to the Treasury official.

The mechanics of how the US will unfreeze assets still has to be
worked out. The United Nations sanctions against Libya remain in
place, a hindrance to efforts to get money to the rebels. The UK and
France, which led the campaign to unseat Qaddafi, yesterday didn’t
commit any financial contributions. Recognition of the council “will
allow some countries to unfreeze some money,” French Foreign Minister
Alain Juppe said. Libyan frozen assets in France total $250 million,
he said.

Other nations have already found the means to act. Italy will open
a credit line to rebels using frozen assets as collateral, and will
provide them with 100 million euros ($141 million), Italian Foreign
Minister Franco Frattini said yesterday. Another 300 million euros
will be released in two weeks and in total, Italy will release 400
million euros, he said, describing the money as loans. The council is
expecting $100 million from Turkey within three days, Shammam said. The
main criterion for international law for the recognition of a rebel
group as the government of a state is its effective control over the
territory.

The recognition of the TNC, given the fact that Qaddafi still
controls Tripoli, could “arguably constitute an illegal interference
in internal affairs,” Stefan Talmon, a professor of International Law
at the University of Oxford, wrote in a paper for the American Society
of International Law. A number of actions by the rebels convinced the
US to offer recognition, including a commitment to pursue a reform
process, and to seek more inclusive representation of Libyans,
politically, geographically and tribally,” according to a State
Department officially.

The US will continue to watch closely how they perform, according
to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The contact
group laid out conditions for a “genuine ceasefire” in a final
statement and declared that “Qaddafi and certain of his family members
must go.” The way he will leave power has yet to be defined, the
group said. The ceasefire conditions call for complete withdrawal of
Qaddafi-led forces to their bases, the release of detainees and
hostages, provision of water and electricity to all regions, and the
opening of all borders for the quick return of refugees. The North
Atlantic Treaty Organization started air strikes in late March to
protect civilians, an intervention that aided rebels seeking Qaddafi’s
ouster.

Qaddafi has already lasted longer than allies had anticipated,
though his hold on the capital, Tripoli, appears to be weakening amid
shortages of food and fuel. There are reports that his government is
seeking a political solution to end the fighting. UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be the only person authorized by the
contact group to negotiate with both sides in Libya. Ban will set up a
board of two to three interlocutors from Tripoli and the rebel-held
town of Benghazi, Frattini said. The military campaign against
Qaddafi will continue “indefinitely” until he steps down, UK Foreign
Secretary William Hague told reporters yesterday in Istanbul.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admitted that
he had
recruited "around 25" men from the
Derna area in eastern Libya
to fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said,
are "today are on the front lines in Adjabiya". Mr al-Hasidi insisted
his fighters "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists," but
added that the "members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader".

His
revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad's president, said
al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel
zone and acquired arms, "including surface-to-air missiles, which
were then smuggled into their sanctuaries".

Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against "the foreign invasion" in Afghanistan, before being "captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan".
He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before
being released in 2008. US and British government sources said Mr
al-Hasidi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG,
which killed dozens of Libyan troops in guerrilla attacks around
Derna and Benghazi in 1995 and 1996.

Even though the LIFG is not part of the al-Qaeda organisation, the
United States military's West Point academy has said the two share an
"increasingly co-operative relationship". In 2007, documents
captured by allied forces from the town of Sinjar, showed LIFG
emmbers made up the second-largest cohort of foreign fighters in
Iraq, after Saudi Arabia.

Earlier
this month, al-Qaeda issued a call for supporters to back the Libyan
rebellion, which it said would lead to the imposition of "the stage of
Islam" in the country. British Islamists have also backed the
rebellion, with the former head of the banned al-Muhajiroun
proclaiming that the call for "Islam, the Shariah and jihad from
Libya" had "shaken the enemies of Islam and the Muslims more than the
tsunami that Allah sent against their friends, the Japanese"

A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly
guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by
American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources
tell ABC News. The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of
the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in
Pakistan, just across the border from Iran. It has taken responsibility
for the deaths and kidnappings of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers
and officials. U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah
is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which
would require an official presidential order or "finding" as well as
congressional oversight.

Tribal sources tell ABC News that money
for Jundullah is funneled to its youthful leader, Abd el Malik Regi,
through Iranian exiles who have connections with European and Gulf
states. Jundullah has produced its own videos showing Iranian soldiers
and border guards it says it has captured and brought back to Pakistan.
The leader, Regi, claims to have personally executed some of the
Iranians. "He used to fight with the Taliban. He's part drug smuggler,
part Taliban, part Sunni activist," said Alexis Debat, a senior fellow
on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant who
recently met with Pakistani officials and tribal members.

"Regi
is essentially commanding a force of several hundred guerrilla fighters
that stage attacks across the border into Iran on Iranian military
officers, Iranian intelligence officers, kidnapping them, executing
them on camera," Debat said.

Most recently, Jundullah took credit
for an attack in February that killed at least 11 members of the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard riding on a bus in the Iranian city of
Zahedan. Last month, Iranian state television broadcast what it said
were confessions by those responsible for the bus attack. They
reportedly admitted to being members of Jundullah and said they had
been trained for the mission at a secret location in Pakistan.

The
Iranian TV broadcast is interspersed with the logo of the CIA, which
the broadcast blamed for the plot. A CIA spokesperson said "the account
of alleged CIA action is false" and reiterated that the U.S. provides
no funding of the Jundullah group. Pakistani government sources say the
secret campaign against Iran by Jundullah was on the agenda when Vice
President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in
February.

A senior U.S. government official said groups such as
Jundullah have been helpful in tracking al Qaeda figures and that it
was appropriate for the U.S. to deal with such groups in that context.
Some former CIA officers say the arrangement is reminiscent of how the
U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including
Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.

An Iranian [terrorist] Cult and Its American Friends

A FEW weeks ago I received an e-mail from an acquaintance with the
subject line: Have you seen the video everyone is talking about? I
clicked play, and there was Howard Dean, on March 19 in Berlin, at his
most impassioned, extolling the virtues of a woman named Maryam Rajavi
and insisting that America should recognize her as the president of
Iran. Ms. Rajavi and her husband, Massoud, are the leaders of a militant
Iranian opposition group called the Mujahedeen Khalq, or Warriors of
God. The group’s forces have been based for the last 25 years in Iraq,
where I visited them shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April
2003.

Mr. Dean’s speech stunned me. But then came Rudolph W. Giuliani saying
virtually the same thing. At a conference in Paris last December, an
emotional Mr. Giuliani told Ms. Rajavi, “These are the most important
yearnings of the human soul that you support, and for your organization
to be described as a terrorist organization is just simply a disgrace.” I
thought I was watching The Onion News Network. Did Mr. Giuliani know
whom he was talking about?

Evidently not. In fact, an unlikely chorus of the group’s backers — some
of whom have received speaking fees, others of whom are inspired by
their conviction that the Iranian government must fall at any cost —
have gathered around Mujahedeen Khalq at conferences in capitals across
the globe. This group of luminaries includes two former chairmen of the joint
chiefs of staff, Gens. Hugh H. Shelton and Peter Pace; Wesley K. Clark,
the former NATO commander; Gen. James L. Jones, who was President
Obama’s national security adviser; Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I.
director; the former intelligence officials Dennis C. Blair and Michael
V. Hayden; the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson; the former
attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former
congressman who was co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

Indeed, the Rajavis and Mujahedeen Khalq are spending millions in an
attempt to persuade the Obama administration, and in particular
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, to take them off the national
list of terrorist groups, where the group was listed in 1997. Delisting
the group would enable it to lobby Congress for support in the same way
that the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 allowed the Iraqi exile Ahmad
Chalabi to do.

Mrs. Clinton should ignore their P.R. campaign. Mujahedeen Khalq is not
only irrelevant to the cause of Iran’s democratic activists, but a
totalitarian cult that will come back to haunt us. When I arrived at Camp Ashraf, the base of the group’s operations, in
April 2003, I thought I’d entered a fictional world of female worker
bees. Everywhere I saw women dressed exactly alike, in khaki uniforms
and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and forth in white pickup
trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were working at a factory in
Maoist China. I met dozens of young women buried in the mouths of tanks,
busily tinkering with the engines. One by one, the girls bounded up to
me and my two minders to recite their transformations from human beings
to acolytes of Ms. Rajavi. One said she had been suicidal in Iran until
she found Ms. Rajavi on the Internet.

At Camp Ashraf, 40 miles north of Baghdad, near the Iranian border,
3,400 members of the militant group reside in total isolation on a
14-square-mile tract of harsh desert land. Access to the Internet,
phones and information about the outside world is prohibited. Posters of
Ms. Rajavi and her smiling green eyes abound. Meanwhile, she lives in
luxury in France; her husband has remained in hiding since the United
States occupied Iraq in 2003. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the group served as Mr. Hussein’s
own private militia opposing the theocratic government in Tehran. For
two decades, he gave the group money, weapons, jeeps and military bases
along the border with Iran. In return, the Rajavis pledged their fealty.

In 1991, when Mr. Hussein crushed a Shiite uprising in the south and
attempted to carry out a genocide against the Kurds in the north, the
Rajavis and their army joined his forces in mowing down fleeing Kurds.
Ms. Rajavi told her disciples, “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and
save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” Many followers
escaped in disgust. So the Rajavis then began preying on Iranian
refugees and asylum seekers
in Europe to fill their ranks. The Rajavis promise them salaries,
marriage, family, freedom and a great cause — fighting the Iranian
government. Then the unwitting youths arrive in Iraq.

What is most disturbing is how the group treats its members. After the
Iran-Iraq war, Mr. Rajavi orchestrated an ill-planned offensive,
deploying thousands of young men and women into Iran on a mass martyrdom
operation. Instead of capturing Iran, as they believed they would,
thousands of them were slaughtered, including parents, husbands and
wives of those I met in Iraq in 2003. After my visit, I met and spoke to men and women who had escaped from
the group’s clutches. Many had to be deprogrammed. They recounted how
people were locked up if they disagreed with the leadership or tried to
escape; some were even killed.

Friendships and all emotional relationships are forbidden. From the time
they are toddlers, boys and girls are not allowed to speak to each
other. Each day at Camp Ashraf you had to report your dreams and
thoughts. If a man was turned on by the scent of a woman or a whiff of perfume, he
had to confess. Members had to attend weekly ideological cleansings in
which they publicly confessed their sexual desires. Members were even
forced to divorce and take a vow of lifelong celibacy to ensure that all
their energy and love would be directed toward Maryam and Massoud.

Mr. Hamilton and Generals Jones and Clark have been paid speakers’ fees
by front groups for Mujahedeen Khalq and have spoken in support of the
group in public conferences. They claimed ignorance of how the group
treated its members. “I don’t know a lot about the group,” Mr. Hamilton told me over the
phone last week. But in 1994, when he was chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, Mr. Hamilton received a report describing the group
as a violent cult with a distinct ideology synthesizing Marxism and
messianic Shiism.

At a February conference in Paris, Mr. Dean praised the group’s
extraordinary “bill of rights.” And General Jones said to Ms. Rajavi:
“It is time for those of us from the United States who have come to know
and admire you and your colleagues and your goals to do what is
required to recognize the legitimacy of your movement and your ideals.”
When I asked General Jones last week if he knew that some considered the
group a totalitarian cult, he replied, “This is the first time I’ve
heard anything about this.” He said he’d checked with military and F.B.I. officials. “I wanted to
make sure we weren’t supporting a group that was doing nefarious things
that I don’t know about,” he said. “Nobody brought it up, so I didn’t
know what questions to ask.”

IN fact, a 2004 F.B.I. report on the group detailed a joint
investigation by the American and German police, which revealed that the
group’s cell in Cologne, Germany, had used money from a complex fraud
scheme to buy military equipment. The group used children with multiple
identities to claim multiple benefit checks from the German government.
Evidence also showed that the group had obtained money in Los Angeles to
purchase GPS units to increase the accuracy of planned mortar attacks
on Tehran.

It is possible that such plots do not bother General Jones and other
supporters of the group. But Iraq will no longer tolerate its presence.
Its government wants the Mujahedeen Khalq out of the country by the end
of the year. In April, Iraqi forces attacked Camp Ashraf. General Jones
and other supporters of the group were outraged. They are right that we should have compassion for those trapped inside
the camp. A 2009 RAND Corporation study found that up to 70 percent of
the group’s members there might have been held against their will. If
the group’s American cheerleaders cared for those at the camp half as
much as they did for the Rajavis, they would be insisting on private Red
Cross visits with each man and woman at Camp Ashraf.

American officials who support the group like to quote the saying, “The
enemy of my enemy is my friend.” By this logic, the group’s opposition
to the Tehran theocracy justifies American backing. But there is another
saying to consider: “The means are the ends.” By using the Mujahedeen Khalq to provoke Tehran, we will end up damaging
our integrity and reputation, and weaken the legitimate democracy
movement within Iran.

As a senior State Department official told me, “They are the best
financed and organized, but they are so despised inside Iran that they
have no traction.” Iranian democracy activists say the group, if it had
had the chance, could have become the Khmer Rouge of Iran. “They are considered traitors and killers of Iranian kids,” said the
official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Mujahedeen
Khalq’s status on the terrorist list is under review. “They are so
unpopular that we think any gesture of support to them would disqualify
and discredit us as being interested in democratic reform.”

If the group is taken off the terrorist list, it will be able to freely
lobby the American government under the guise of an Iranian democracy
movement. Recent history has shown that the United States often ends up
misguidedly supporting not only the wrong exile groups in the Middle
East, but the least relevant ones. We cannot afford to be so naïve or
misguided again.

At
a time of partisan gridlock in the capital, one obscure cause has
drawn a stellar list of supporters from both parties and the last two
administrations, including a dozen former top national security
officials. That alone would be unusual. What makes it astonishing is the
object of their attention: a fringe Iranian opposition group, long an
ally of Saddam Hussein, that is designated as a terrorist organization
under United States law and described by State Department officials as a
repressive cult despised by most Iranians and Iraqis.

The extraordinary lobbying effort to reverse the terrorist designation
of the group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Mujahedeen, has won the
support of two former C.I.A. directors, R. James Woolsey and Porter J.
Goss; a former F.B.I. director, Louis J. Freeh; a former attorney
general, Michael B. Mukasey; President George W. Bush’s first homeland
security chief, Tom Ridge; President Obama’s first national security
adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; big-name Republicans like the former New
York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Democrats like the former Vermont
governor Howard Dean; and even the former top counterterrorism official
of the State Department, Dell L. Dailey, who argued unsuccessfully for
ending the terrorist label while in office.

The American advocates have been well paid, hired through their
speaking agencies and collecting fees of $10,000 to $50,000 for
speeches on behalf of the Iranian group. Some have been flown to Paris,
Berlin and Brussels for appearances. But they insist that their motive
is humanitarian — to protect and resettle about 3,400 members of the
group, known as the M.E.K., now confined in a camp in Iraq. They say
the terrorist label, which dates to 1997 and then reflected decades of
violence that included the killing of some Americans in the 1970s, is
now outdated, unjustified and dangerous.

Emotions are running high as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
completes a review of the terrorist designation. The government of
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has said it plans to close
the camp, Camp Ashraf, by Dec. 31 and move the people elsewhere in Iraq
in order to reassert Iraqi sovereignty over the land where it is
located, 40 miles north of Baghdad. Two earlier incursions by Iraqi
troops into Camp Ashraf led to bloody confrontations, with 11 residents
killed in July 2009 and at least 34 in April of this year. The M.E.K.
and its American supporters say that they believe the Maliki
government, with close ties to Iran, may soon carry out a mass
slaughter on the pretext of regaining control of the camp.

If that happens, the supporters say, the United States — which disarmed
the M.E.K. and guaranteed the security of the camp after the invasion
of Iraq — will bear responsibility.

“We
made a promise,” said Mr. Ridge, a former congressman and governor of
Pennsylvania. “Our credibility is on the line. They’ve been attacked
twice. How can we possibly accept assurances from the Maliki
government?” Mr. Ridge suggested that the M.E.K.’s implacable hostility
to the rulers of Iran should be a point in their favor. “In my view, if
you’re a threat to Ahmadinejad,” — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s
president — “well, the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Mr. Ridge said.
He noted that the M.E.K. had provided information on Iran’s nuclear program during the Bush administration.

The M.E.K. advocacy campaign has included full-page newspaper
advertisements identifying the group as “Iran’s Main Opposition” — an
absurd distortion in the view of most Iran specialists; leaders of
Iran’s broad opposition, known as the Green Movement, have denounced the
group. The M.E.K. has hired high-priced lobbyists like the Washington
firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
Its lawyers in Europe won a long fight to persuade the European Union
to drop its own listing of the M.E.K. as a terrorist group in 2009.

The group’s spending, certainly in the millions of dollars, has
inevitably raised questions about funding sources. Ali Safavi, who runs a
pro-M.E.K. group in Washington called Near East Policy Research,
says the money comes from wealthy Iranian expatriates in the United
States and Europe. Because “material support” to a designated terrorist
group is a crime, advocates insist that the money goes only to
sympathizers and not to the M.E.K. itself. Congress has taken note of
the campaign. A House resolution for dropping the terrorist listing has
97 co-sponsors, including the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan.

At
a hearing this month, senators pressed the defense secretary, Leon E.
Panetta, about the threat to Camp Ashraf. A State Department spokesman,
Mark Toner, said officials there were “working as quickly as possible”
to complete a review of the M.E.K.’s terrorist designation. American
officials are supporting an effort by the United Nations to resettle
Camp Ashraf residents voluntarily to other countries, a process that is
making slow progress.

Other
State Department officials, addressing the issue on the condition of
anonymity because it is still under deliberation, said that they did
believe the 3,400 residents of Camp Ashraf were in danger as the Dec. 31
deadline approaches. “We’re in constant talks with the Iraqis and the
Ashraf leadership to show maximum flexibility on the closure of the
camp,” one official said.

But
the officials expressed frustration at what they described as the
American supporters’ credulous acceptance of the M.E.K.’s claims of
representing the Iranian opposition and of embracing democratic values.
In years of observation, the official said, Americans have seen that the
camp’s leaders “exert total control over the lives of Ashraf’s
residents, much like we would see in a totalitarian cult,” requiring
fawning devotion to the M.E.K.’s leaders, Maryam Rajavi, who lives in
France, and her husband, Massoud, whose whereabouts are unknown.

Moreover, the official said, the group is “hated almost universally by
the Iranian population,” in part for siding with Mr. Hussein in the
Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. A State Department cable this year concluded
that any indication of United States support for the M.E.K. “would
fuel anti-American sentiment” in Iran and would “likely empower Iranian
hardliners.”

In Iraq, the M.E.K. is also widely despised, especially by the
country’s Shiite majority, because it is accused of helping the Iraqi
dictator crush a Shiite revolt in 1991 — a charge the group denies.
Because of deep Iraqi hostility, American officials argue that merely
dropping the terrorist designation would not end the danger of attacks
on the group.

While the M.E.K. carried out a campaign of attacks from the 1970s to
the 1990s, mostly targeting Iranian officials, supporters say it has
renounced violence and has not engaged in terrorist acts for a decade.
The designation law, however, allows Mrs. Clinton to keep the label for a
group that “retains the capability and intent to engage in terrorist
activity or terrorism.” Such a decision would outrage the American
advocates of reversing the terrorist label.

Mr. Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to
2009, said the administration’s failure to act decisively threatened a
“humanitarian catastrophe.” Mr. Mukasey said he did not believe the
claim that the M.E.K. was a cult, but even if true, it was no reason to
keep the terrorist listing. “These people are sitting in the camp,
completely harmless,” he said.

Like other advocates, Mr. Mukasey said he had been paid his standard
speaking fee — $15,000 to $20,000, according to the Web site of his
speakers’ agency — to talk at M.E.K.-related events. But he insisted
that the money was not a factor for him or other former officials who
had taken up the cause. “There’s no way I would compromise my standing
by expressing views I don’t believe in,” he said.

The Iranians have made these allegations of Israeli terrorist attacks
carried out by MEK for quite a while, but only now does it have
confirmation from U.S. officials. Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide
to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a recent interview
with NBC News claimed they knew Israel was funding MEK, sharing
intelligence, and training them inside Israel in the use of motorcycles
and bombs.

Even if its true, as U.S. officials insist, that Washington has no
involvement in these terrorist attacks, they do support Israel through
unmatched economic aid, arms sales, and diplomatic support. As Larijani
recently told NBC News, if America, Israel’s closest ally, is aware of
this terrorism, “the United States has an obligation…to push Israel not
to do it” and “to pursue it, like pursuing us, at the United Nations
with different resolutions.”

It’s seems counterintuitive, to say the least. Indeed, it seems quite
mad. And yet we now have all the evidence we need to point to a de
facto Israeli alliance with Al Qaeda. The bombing of Damascus suburbs by Israeli jets – purportedly
in order to prevent the Syrians from supplying Hezbollah with long
range missiles – at precisely the moment when the Syrian “rebels” are demanding Western intervention on their behalf highlights one of the most bizarre alliances in history. Bizarre, yes, but inexplicable? Not at all.

The Syrian government is claiming
the Israelis “coordinated” their attack with the rebels, but this seems
problematic – and is largely irrelevant. Yes, a rebel spokesman “blessed”
the Israeli strike, but I rather doubt there’s ongoing communication
between the rebel leadership and Tel Aviv. It’s simply not necessary:
after all, their goals in the region are complementary, if not
identical. The Sunni extremists who comprise Al Qaeda have been in the front lines in the battle against Bashar al-Assad, and are also bitterly hostile to the mullahs of Tehran, whom they consider heretics: Israel, for its part, has launched its own holy war
against Iran for quite different reasons, and is eager to take out
Assad: regardless of motives their goals do coincide. Both want chaos in
Syria – the Israelis, in order to eliminate a longstanding thorn in
their side, and the jihadists because they thrive in failed states, like
Lebanon.

Why would the Israelis aid a “rebel” army made up almost exclusively of hardened jihadists who supposedly hate Israel and want to see its non-Arab inhabitants driven into the sea? For the same reason they initiallynurtured Hamas
– because they believe it serves their long range purposes. The reason
the Israelis granted official legal status to the group that eventually
morphed into one of the Jewish state’s most implacable enemies was
simple: to divide the Palestinian resistance, and therefore weaken it.
At the time, Fatah, the largest component of the secular Palestinian
Liberation Organization, was the most effective opposition to the
Israeli occupation. The Israelis thought aiding an Islamist competitor
would achieve certain desired ends: the decline of the PLO’s influence, the alienation of Arab governments from the Palestinian cause, and the marginalization of that cause in Western eyes. All three goals have since been achieved.

The Israelis are assisting the Syrian jihadists for similar reasons:
because it fits in rather neatly with their long-range goals. For a look
at those goals, all you have to do is peruse a 1996 document prepared
for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by leading neoconservatives,
proposing a radical new Israeli “defense” strategy. Reading “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” is like reading a timeline of events in the Middle East for the past ten years. As I wrote
in October of 2003, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the
Yom Kippur War – a day when Israel bombed alleged “terrorist camps” in
Syria:

“The paper, co-authored by Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, portrayed Syria as the main enemy of Israel, but maintained the road to Damascus had to first pass through Baghdad: “‘Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with
Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back
Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in
Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a
means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged
Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the
Hashemites in Iraq.’”

Well, we didn’t get the Hashemites – but Maliki will do. Or, rather, near complete chaos
will suffice, as the religious civil war wracking the Muslim world
takes another potential enemy out of contention. Now that Iraq lies bleeding by the wayside, King Bibi is speeding down that “Clean Break” highway, eager to turn two more regional rivals into roadkill. As I have written before, Syria is our Spain – a proxy war prefiguring a much larger conflict, with the US, Israel, Turkey, Jordan, and Al Qaeda (in the guise of the “Al Nusra Front”) versus the Syrian Ba’athists, Hezbollah, and – standing behind them – Iran.

Israel’s role in this is key. It isn’t just Israeli jets providing
air cover for the jihadists in Syria: the Israel lobby has been going full tilt in a push to drag the US into the conflict. And they don’t care how they do it. The other day, in a debate on intervention in Syria on NPR, a representative of WINEP, the “educational” arm of AIPAC, accused anti-interventionist Joshua Landis
of “dual loyalty” because his wife is an Alawite! Of course, the Israel
lobby isn’t guilty of dual loyalty – their one and only loyalty is to
the state of Israel, nothing dual about it.

The “chemical weapons” hoax topped the long list of similar scams set up by the Syrian rebels and their Western supporters in its brazen effrontery: not since the “Niger uranium” papers have we seen such a downright sloppy scheme to lie us into war. Samples taken from rebel sources
tested positive for sarin – and the administration was supposed to
accept that at face value? Back to the drawing board, and the same old
question: how do we drag a reluctant US President into an open military confrontation with Iran?

Only a few years ago it would’ve been hard to believe the Americans
weren’t clued in beforehand that Israeli jets would soon be pounding
Damascus. However, given the relations between this administration and the Netanyahu government, one is hardly shocked to learn it came as a surprise. The War Party is playing its trump card – and we’ll see if the President has anything up his sleeve to beat it. In an effort to stay out of a major mess that could get far messier, the White House is up against not only the Israel lobby, the McCain brigade, and powerful members
of his own party, he’s also swimming against the foreign policy current
that dominated the previous administration – and also his own.

It was during the Bush regime’s effort to save face by proclaiming
“victory” at the end of the Iraq “surge” that the US decided to play the Sunni card
and forge a regional coalition to block Iranian dominance of the
region. That this turn ended up with the US and Al Qaeda on the same
side in the Syrian trenches is hardly surprising – or unprecedented. Bin
Laden’s legions fought in the Kosovo war
on the side of their Kosovar Muslim brothers and NATO: many present day
jihadists are veterans of that conflict, just as they are veterans of Afghanistan, Libya, and Chechnya
– all regions where the jihadists and the Americans are de facto
allies. In the Balkans, we used them to block Russian influence in
Europe: in Syria, we are using them to run interference with the
Iranians. In resisting – at least publicly – the call to intervene more
visibly, this President is contravening the trajectory of American
policy in the region – and the US ship of state, an enormous and
therefore unwieldy vessel, is not so easily turned around. It has a
momentum all its own.

The White House has been besieged by the “humanitarian” interventionist crowd – by Democrats, including, in Congress, Carl Levin, Robert Menendez, and Dianne Feinstein – to “do something” in Syria, while the Republican hawks swirling around John McCain have been howling for a “no fly zone” and military aid to the rebels. Of course, the American people oppose
us getting involved in the Syrian imbroglio, but they don’t count: the
gaggle of foreign lobbyists and laptop bombardiers who rule Washington
are, as usual, the only voices being heard.

Who will channel the populist wisdom of the war-weary and
too-often-lied-to American people? While the warlords of Washington are
merrily planning yet another war to benefit Israel based on lying
“evidence” of WMD, where are all these supposed Republican
“isolationists” we’ve been hearing so much about? Put up, or shut up,
fellas.

The only problem is, it apparently didn’t happen. At least not the
way ABC News claims. Instead of being direct US backing, by way of the
CIA, for a State Department listed terrorist organization (a big no-no),
Foreign Policy is reporting today that the whole thing was actually a Mossad plot designed to frame the CIA and the administration. Officials cite internal memos, classified of course, from the 2007
and 2008 investigation into the allegations, which found that in reality
the people who bought off Jundallah were Mossad agents, with faked US
passports and large amounts of US dollars.

“It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with,”
one of the officials said. “Their recruitment activities were nearly in
the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.”

The report goes on to say that President Bush “went ballistic” when
he heard about the Mossad plot, saying it was “putting Americans at
risk.” There was also concern it would severely damage relations with
Pakistan, since Jundallah has traditionally also attacked targets in
Pakistani Balochistan. The US State Department has been struggling to publicly deny the US-Jundallah relationship,
and retired US Gen. Joe Hoar slammed the Israeli move, saying “It gets
us involved in their covert war, whether we want to be involved or not.”

"To many, it came as a surprise that the RCMP is alleging that two
terror suspects arrested in Canada on Monday were supported by al-Qaeda
operatives in Iran.

The Sunni-based al-Qaeda and Shia Iran belong
to different branches of Islam that have been at odds historically. But
in recent years U.S. officials have formally alleged that Iran has
allowed al-Qaeda members to operate out of its territory."

Both at face value and upon deeper examination, this assertion is
utterly absurd, divorced from reality, and indicative of the absolute
contempt within which the Western establishment holds the global public.
In reality, the West, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in particular,
have propped up and perpetuated Al Qaeda for the very purpose of either
undermining or overthrowing the governments of Iran, Syria, Iraq,
Lebanon, Algeria, Libya, Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and beyond.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush
Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in
the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with
Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations
that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is
backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations
aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has
been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant
vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident
organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the
groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of
Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former
C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South
Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni
fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe
them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads
of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that
we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in
Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted
for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the
September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

The report would continue by stating (emphasis added):

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is
the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement,
which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of
Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers
attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,”
Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they
are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took
responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard
soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed.
According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the
groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The manifestation of this insidious conspiracy can be seen playing out across Syria in which US-backed terrorists openly operating under the flag of Al Qaeda
are locked in a catastrophic sectarian bloodbath with the Syrian people
and the Syrian state's closest ally, Iran. The conflict in Syria
exposes that the machinations revealed back in 2007-2008 by Hersh, are
still being carried out in earnest today.

Clearly, US-Canadian claims that Iran is somehow involved in harboring
Al Qaeda within its borders, when it has been the West for years
propping them up specifically to overthrow the Iranian government, are
utterly absurd. In reality, while the West uses Al Qaeda's presence both
within Iran and along it peripheries to undermine and ultimately
overthrow the Iranian government, it in turn uses these very terror
organizations to induce paralyzing fear across Western populations in
order to consolidate and expand power at home.

Essentially throwing these activists under the bus, New York Times exposes that the April 6
Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and
Entsar Qadhi of Yemen amongst others, received training and
financing from the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the Neo-Conservative lined Freedom House.

The New York Times goes on to explain that these organizations are in turn funded by the National Endowment for Democracy which receives 100 million USD from Congress while Freedom House receives most of its money from the US State Department.
While the New York Times asserts “no one doubts that the Arab
uprisings are home grown,” leaders of groups now admittedly funded and
trained by the US are anything but “home grown.” The most prominent
example is the April 6 Movement of Egypt led by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Crisis Group.
ElBaradei sitting along side George Soros, Kenneth Adelman, Wesley
Clark, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, within a US foreign policy
think-tank engenders a considerable amount of “doubt.”

U.S. assistance to Egypt is helping political parties of all ideologies
prepare for the upcoming elections -- even Islamic parties that may
have anti-Western agendas. "We don't do party support. What we do is
party training.... And we do it to whoever comes," William Taylor, the
State Department's director of its new office
for Middle East Transitions, said in a briefing with reporters today.
"Sometimes, Islamist parties show up, sometimes they don't. But it has
been provided on a nonpartisan basis, not to individual parties."

The programs, contracted through the National Democratic Institute for
International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute
(IRI), include helping political parties in Egypt conduct polling,
provide constituent services, and prepare for election season. NDI's
chairwoman is former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. IRI's
chairman is Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)

Taylor said that none of the U.S. funding that has gone to election
preparation is coordinated or vetted through the Supreme Council of the
Armed Forces (SCAF), which assumed power after the overthrow of former
President Hosni Mubarak. "It absolutely does not go to the SCAF," he
said, noting that the Egyptian military still receives billions in
military aid from the United States.

Taylor, who just got back from a trip to Egypt and Tunisia, said that
he left Egypt unworried about the SCAF holding on to power after the
coming elections. "They wanted to make it very clear to this American
sitting on the other side of the table that they didn't like the
governing business," he said. "I do believe that they are uncomfortable
governing. Some would say they're not doing a great job of it. "

Taylor led a similar office in the 1990s that coordinated policy in
Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. He is pressing for $2
billion in new aid to Egypt, half in loans and half in debt
forgiveness, but acknowledged that the U.S. fiscal situation is not
nearly as good now as it was then.

"This is a tight time on budgets here, as we all know. And when [State
Department spokeswoman] Toria [Nuland] and I worked together earlier, we
had a lot more money to put in to the former Soviet Union, Eastern
Europe," he said. "Now, that having been said, we recognize that there
are other countries that are eager to provide support, and we support
that."

But Taylor also said that promises of financial assistance to Egypt
from other countries in the region have not materialized, leaving
Egypt's government with little choice but to accept billions of dollar
in loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank
-- loans that come with strings attached.

"The IMF was in Egypt, and they put an offer of about $3 billion on the
table for the finance minister. The finance minister was interested. He
went to the SCAF. The SCAF said, ‘No, thank you.' The finance minister
told the IMF, ‘No, thank you.' But just last week when I was there, he
told me that he's likely to be able to accept an IMF offer this time,"
Taylor said.

Egypt owes the United States about $1 billion over the next three years
from previous loans, but if Congress agrees, the State Department wants
to let Egypt keep that money and spend it on its political transition,
with U.S. consultation. "We, the United States government, will agree
with you, the Egyptian government, on how to spend that billion dollars
in Egypt," Taylor said. "But it won't come here. It won't come back to
the Treasury. It'll stay there and do projects that we are working on
right now."

Taylor said the money would be spent on an "identifiable" joint project
that would show Egyptians that "yes, we do care if your transition
works."

Offering new revelations about the CIA's role in shutting down
military intelligence penetration of al-Qaeda, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer
joins a growing list of government officials accusing former CIA
director George Tenet of misleading federal investigators and sharing
some degree of blame for the 9/11 attacks.

A decorated ex-clandestine operative for the Pentagon offers new
revelations about the role the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
played in the shut-down of the military's notorious Able Danger program, alleged to have identified five of the 9/11 hijackers inside America more than a year before the attacks.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer joins a growing list of government officials
accusing former CIA director George Tenet of misleading federal bodies
and sharing some degree of blame for the attacks. Shaffer also adds to a
picture emerging of the CIA's Bin Laden unit as having actively
prevented other areas of intelligence, law enforcement and defense from
properly carrying out their counterterrorism functions in the run-up to
September 2001.

Shaffer spoke to documentary filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski in late 2011, on the day Judicial Watch successfully forced
the Department of Defense (DOD) to declassify many Able Danger
documents through their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The
materials newly in the public domain allowed Shaffer to speak more
candidly than ever before. While he maintains the DOD bureaucracy was
always the main obstacle for Able Danger, he offers fresh disclosures on
the role played by the CIA in the shut-down of its military offensive.

In the wake of the devastating African embassy bombings of 1998,
which left more than 200 dead, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) -
responsible for the Pentagon's secret commando units - brought together
specialists from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to begin mapping
the al-Qaeda network. Based in the Information Dominance Center - also
referred to as Land Information Warfare Activity, or LIWA - at Fort
Belvoir, Virginia, the team's advanced data-mining software found
connections between known terrorists and subjects with matching
profiles. This highly classified project was code-named Able Danger.

The project first came to public attention in June 2005, nearly one
year after the 9/11 Commission released its report, when Congressman
Curt Weldon gave a special orders speech
on the floor of the House of Representatives. Following attacks on
Weldon's credibility, five Pentagon whistleblowers came forward to back
up his claims, including Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a CIA-trained senior
intelligence operations officer, Bronze Star Medal recipient and reserve
Army lieutenant colonel with more than 22 years in the intelligence
community.

Shaffer now claims the media's focus on the data-collection aspect of
Able Danger missed the point. "Data mining kind of became, to use a
film term, the MacGuffin," says Shaffer, a reference to a narrative
device - often used in Alfred Hitchcock movies - which drives the plot
while ultimately having no relevance to it. "That was the throwaway they
wanted people to focus on. The overall project was something that
covered the entire command structure of [SOCOM]. The project was put
together to give the national command authority options."

In other words, the collecting of information about al-Qaeda's cell
structures was only meant to be a first step in a larger action to be
taken using the data. "It wasn't simply an experiment. My actual
assignment wasn't Able Danger. I could never testify to the actual
operational objectives assigned to me and my unit for the purposes of
Able Danger." The Able Danger project, portrayed in most media reports
as a mere data-mining exercise, was in fact fully integrated into a
larger military effort to target and disrupt al-Qaeda. Its actual
capabilities and objectives remain classified.

Shaffer contends that the most damning revelations lie in that
still-classified aspect of the project, the operational side. Asked what
the next step was to be against the so-called Brooklyn cell identified
by Able Danger which he says included five of the 9/11 hijackers,
Shaffer responded, "I can't talk about that."

At the center of the military's intended action was a long-term asset
recruited by DIA years before Able Danger, a retired Afghan general who
had direct access to al-Qaeda activities in Afghanistan. "We had a
clear access point to al-Qaeda we were using for our operational
purposes," says Shaffer. "The asset was a separate operation we were
going to use for access. We were going to use still-classified
capabilities." That all changed when CIA got involved.

Following the embassy attacks, the White House became concerned about
a deficit of access by CIA into al-Qaeda. President Clinton's
Cabinet-level counter-terror director Richard Clarke said he pushed for a
shakeup at the agency. "We needed a new direction," Clarke has
explained. At Clarke's behest, Tenet, CIA director between 1997 and
2005, removed Michael Scheuer, the founder of its Bin Laden unit - also
known as Alec Station.
Two men with strong operational backgrounds, Cofer Black and Richard
Blee, were brought in to take over leadership. "When Cofer Black took
over the counterterrorism center at the CIA, he was aghast that they had
no sources inside al-Qaeda," reported Clarke. "So he told me, 'I'm
going to try to get sources in al-Qaeda.'"

As Black and Blee began their efforts at the CIA, Able Danger was
ramping up. Then-Major Anthony Shaffer was at that time in charge of a
secretive DIA unit known as Stratus Ivy, facilitating five major DOD
black operations. The assets each held equal importance. Shaffer says
SOCOM brought him into the Able Danger project to work on agent
coordination in 1999.

That October, Shaffer was asked by Navy Captain Scott Philpott,
then-head of operations for the Able Danger initiative, to brief the CIA
liaison to SOCOM, a senior agency official. But the meeting did not go
well. In the interview with Nowosielski and Duffy, Shaffer names the CIA
representative for the first time. He was Cold War veteran David Rolph,
previously a station chief for the agency in Moscow.

"We, the Able Danger team, would like to have access to Alec Station
to conduct our operations," Shaffer said he told Rolph. But Rolph
explained that unless Gen. Peter Schoomaker, commander of SOCOM,
personally and directly approached CIA director Tenet for access, they
would not get it. Shaffer offered Alec Station a "seat at the table,"
allowing a station employee into their process.

According to Shaffer, Rolph bluntly informed him the CIA would never
cooperate with SOCOM on the matter, because if the military succeeded in
prosecuting the options for going after the infrastructure of al-Qaeda,
it would "steal the thunder" of Alec Station. Shaffer found the
response peculiar, even for the notoriously turf-defensive agency.

"I spent a lot of time working in joint projects between Special
Operations Command and CIA," Shaffer revealed. "So the fact that in this
one area they would not cooperate was new, and it concerned me. But
very often the CIA would just do things without regard to anyone else."

How the CIA's go-it-alone attitude regarding al-Qaeda helped enable
the events of 2001 has only recently gained wider public attention. The
story, reduced to an obscure endnote in the 9/11 Commission Report, exploded in 2011when it emerged that Richard Clarke, counter-terror director for both Presidents Clinton and Bush, had, in a filmed interview,
accused the CIA of deliberately withholding information on two of the
9/11 conspirators, the same ones separately discovered by Able Danger.

According to Clarke, some 50 employees in Black's and Blee's units
would likely have known from early 2000 that conspirators Khalid
al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi - among those who would commandeer
American Airlines Flight 77, and reportedly the closest to Bin Laden
himself - were working for al-Qaeda and had arrived in the United
States. Incredibly, the agency sat on this information for up to 18
months, ignoring standard protocol requiring them to tell the FBI and
Clarke's team on the White House National Security Council.

Only a high-level decision could explain the silence of officers he
spoke with regularly, Clarke believes. Pressed by John Duffy, the former
head of counter-terrorism sensationally placed the blame on the CIA
director. Tenet and others were quick to issue a dismissive press
statement. But it can now be revealed the CIA's negligence went far
beyond keeping critical intelligence to itself.

Around the same time Alec Station learned of al-Mihdhar's and
al-Hazmi's likely arrival in the US, Able Danger's data-mining also
unearthed the same individuals' domestic presence. According to several
people who directly participated in the project, by mid-2000 their data
mine had identified five "hotspots" for al-Qaeda activity - including
the German- and New York-based cells later implicated in the hijacking
plot. Much of the controversy has centered on whether, more than a year
before the events of 2001, Able Danger had identified lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. A Senate Intelligence Committee investigation and Defense Department Inspector General (IG) report have concluded otherwise.
Still, Shaffer and colleagues remain adamant that key witnesses were
ignored and testimony distorted in the IG's final report. In other
words, it was a classic whitewash.

"We found two of the three cells
which conducted the [9/11] attacks," says Shaffer. "They were the
'Brooklyn cell' not by geography, but they were the Brooklyn cell
because members of the cell formed a similar profile to those who
conducted the '93 World Trade Center bombing. We were looking at
individuals, groups, and who they talked to, relationships, if they went
to a certain mosque during a certain period of time." LIWA analysts
created a massive chart with the names and photos of these terrorists.
"We discovered these guys here and the CIA apparently knew these guys
were here," he insists. "And yeah, nobody really seems to know what was
going on."

Shaffer says the significance was understood at the time. "We were
scared to death that we had found operational cells ... within the
United States. We did not have all the pieces of the puzzle, and we were
not able to make sense of everything we had. Military action was going
to be the ultimate outcome of the project."

Shaffer recruited LIWA as part of that military response. "They were
going to be targeteers in the effort. I was able to convince SOCOM to
bring them in. I knew the commander, Maj. Gen. Bob Newman." Shaffer said
Newman encouraged him to use the Army's Intelligence and Security
Command (INSCOM) - conducting intel, security and information operations
for the military's commanders - to run the "black" side. Shaffer will
only hint that the action to come was to involve cyberspace. "As we
started developing the methodology to approach targeting the global
elements of al-Qaeda, there was a great deal of push-back from the
community."

Shaffer said he personally briefed Tenet on a number of occasions,
from 1999 to 2001, on aspects of Able Danger and other concurrent DIA
projects. In the pre-9/11 structure, the CIA director was also the
director of central intelligence for the US government at large,
overseeing all 16 agencies that made up the intelligence community,
including DIA. We do not know if the presence of the Brooklyn cell
inside the US was briefed to Tenet. Shaffer refused to disclose details
of the classified briefings. Whatever he did report, Shaffer said that,
"Tenet did not feel comfortable with some of the things we were talking
about."

In his 2009 interview with Duffy and Nowosielski, Richard Clarke
speculated that the CIA's Alec Station may already have been running its
own domestic operation by that time to track al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi,
living under their own names in Southern California. Clarke admitted he
had no way of proving his assertion, but believed it was the only way he
could make sense of the facts. His theory is given credence by five
former FBI counter-terror officials who backed his assertion that Alec Station was deliberately withholding information about the future 9/11 hijackers.

That spring, Army Intelligence and Security Command attorney Tony
Gentry got involved, claiming to be concerned over domestic spying by
the US military, which is not allowed; he also worried about rules
prohibiting the retention of data about a US person for longer than 90
days. Shaffer was told many of the individuals in the cells were
becoming citizens or had green cards. They were told they couldn't look
at them, that they were out of bounds. Shaffer said he was informed by
DOD lawyers that many al-Qaeda extremists were inside the US because
they did a lot of American fundraising. They were not considered a
threat.

"I still to this day believe this concern [over data retention] was a
farce," Shaffer says with a tinge of anger in his voice, "based on the
way the US government abuses US citizen information constantly in other
areas." The Brooklyn cell was debated within SOCOM. Shaffer met with
three-star Gen. Larry Ellis, the senior operations officer for Army in
spring 2000. Ellis agreed with Shaffer, but DOD lawyers insisted it was
not the military's job to do that level of information gathering.

"It became clear that someone didn't want us looking at the data, and
they gave an extraordinary direction." Army staff lawyers directed
Capt. Eric Kleinsmith to destroy some 2.5 terabytes
of publicly sourced data. In March or April 2000, the offices of Orion
Scientific Systems, a private contractor employed by LIWA for the
program, were stormed by armed federal agents. Much of the material
produced for Able Danger was confiscated - and with it went the US
military's best shot at unraveling the hijacking plot.

Soon after the end of the data collection aspect of Able Danger, the
CIA pushed for the shut down of the operational side. The retired Afghan
general at the center of Able Danger's planning was what is known in
spook parlance as a "principal agent." Principal agents serve as proxies
for professional intelligence case officers. Case officers for the CIA
or DIA manage principal agents from stations around the world, and those
principal agents in turn handle their own agent networks. The DIA's
asset oversaw a network of other infiltrating agents, their names known
to Shaffer and his team. After briefing the CIA director, Shaffer began
to suspect Alec Station was using the information to recruit from the
Afghan general's network.

"Basically, they were stealing our assets," Shaffer said. He believes
Alec Station had become desperate to infiltrate al-Qaeda. "They were
kind of on the outside looking in. I think we had a better set of
accesses than they did, and that's why they wanted to terminate our
asset and use his subsets for their own."

Once the agency had successfully recruited enough assets from the
DIA's principal agent, they finally wanted DIA out of the picture
altogether. In September or October 2000, Shaffer's boss, Army General
Bob Hardy Jr., was forced to square off against the CIA director in a
closed session before the House Intelligence Committee. Shaffer
characterizes it as "a major battle."

Congress established the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1977,
supposedly to oversee executive branch departments of the United States
government. Whether it succeeds in its role is debatable, but in any
case when the CIA took the step of complaining to the committee, it was
evidently taken seriously. Tenet made the case that Able Danger was
interfering with a parallel operation by the CIA, apparently being run
from Alec Station.

"George Tenet went to Congress and lied," Shaffer boldly stated.
Tenet painted DIA's retired Afghan general source as a murderer, a claim
Shaffer says was unfounded. He had heard Tenet did so at the behest of
"all of Alec Station," then run by Blee, which was complaining loudly
about Able Danger. "We felt CIA made a huge mistake for political
reasons, only to back off ... with regard to the asset in Afghanistan.
But in hindsight it is very clear the CIA had its own game, and they
were not interested in cooperating to the point where they were
interfering with our ability to conduct our own offensive capability
against al-Qaeda." Based on Tenet's testimony, Congress ordered DIA's
asset - with direct access to al-Qaeda activities in Afghanistan -
terminated. Shaffer characterizes Tenet's deception as causing "huge
damage" to the overall concept of his part of the program.

It is not the first time a former official has accused Tenet of lying
to a government body. Speaking about Alec Station's withholding of
intelligence about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi from himself and his staff,
Richard Clarke explained," [Tenet, Black and Blee] have been able to get
through a joint House investigation committee and get through the 9/11
Commission, and this has never come out. They got away with it."

In his public testimony before the Congressional Intelligence Committees, Tenet was asked directly by Sen. Carl Levin
about a cable that came into Alec Station in 2000 alerting them that
al-Hazmi had flown to the US. Tenet's answer to Levin: "Nobody read that
cable in March, in the March timeframe."

Levin pushed: "So the cable that said that Hazmi had entered the United States came to your headquarters, nobody read it?" "Yes sir." Tenet's own CIA Inspector General, John Helgerson, later revealed in
the declassified summary of his still-classified 9/11 report that 50 to
60 officers inside Black's and Blee's units knew of reports in 2000 that
al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar may have been in the US.

Tom Kean, chairman of the 9/11 commission, also revealed his doubts about Tenet in a 2008 interview with Nowosielski and journalist Rory O'Connor,
asserting the commissioners felt Tenet had been "obviously not
forthcoming" in some of his testimony before their "lawfully constituted
body, created by Congress and the President." Asked whether they
believed he had misspoken during statements that later proved false,
Kean responded, "No, I don't think he misspoke. I think he misled."

In late 2000, the data mining aspect of the military's project was
reconstituted as "Able Danger II" and moved to a classified private
intelligence research center in Garland, Texas. When command of SOCOM
changed hands from the retiring Gen. Schoomaker to Gen. Charles Holland
in November, Holland again ordered termination of the efforts in Texas
and for the personnel to return to SOCOM headquarters in Florida.

Shaffer claimed there were at least three senior military exchanges
over the order that resulted in yelling contests. Most notable was in
December when Maj. Gen. Rod Isler, director of operations for DIA,
called in their boss Admiral Tom Wilson, the DIA Director, who reported
to Tenet. In a shouting match, Wilson directed Isler and Shaffer to stop
supporting Able Danger II.

In January 2001, with a new President, George W. Bush, in the White
House, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer briefed Gen. Hugh Shelton, the man who
had originally supported the formation of Able Danger, on the program
results and operational options, including the possibility of
reactivating the retired Afghan general asset that George Tenet had
caused to be disengaged.

Shaffer said he provided a variation of the same briefing to Tenet
himself in February, with DIA Director Adm. Tom Wilson present. The
following month, Gen. Ron Isler ordered Shaffer
to completely end his work on Able Danger II. Shaffer strongly
disagreed, resulting in an argument, before Isler pulled rank on him.
From that point on, Able Danger II was essentially done.

Two months later, Shaffer would receive a frantic call
from another Able Danger officer desperately wanting to know if Shaffer
would permit him to save the information by moving it to one of
Shaffer's military facilities for the purposes of developing a plan of
action. When Shaffer asked his boss, Col. Mary Moffitt, she took such
offense at his "insubordinance" [sic] in mentioning Able Danger again
that she began the process of demoting Shaffer from his leadership
position to one on the Latin American desk of DIA.

Shaffer believes it is possible, though he has no way of knowing for
certain, that Tenet played a back-channel role in the shut-downs of both
Able Danger and Able Danger II. "Tenet could talk to DOD lawyers. CIA
lawyers could talk to DOD lawyers, with the understanding that Tenet
wants something said. I've been asked to carry messages from senior
leaders, one to another. There's no documentation on that meeting. No
one ever knows it occurred, without any paper trail. It's done all the
time. Lawyers belong to the senior leadership they belong to. It would
not be surprising to me if there was some level of pressure ... brought
to bear to back people off or discourage them."

On the subject of Richard Clarke's bombshell, the decorated
intelligence officer is guarded. "Clarke may well be correct in his
assessment that the CIA felt they were smarter than everybody else," he
reflects. "They were trying to control assets, and I do believe, from my
perspective they were working to suppress other operational activities
which would either compete with them, or potentially report on some of
the things they were doing."

What if David Rolph, speaking on behalf of the agency's director when
he met Shaffer in late 1999, had been more cooperative? What if Tenet
had not pushed Congress to shut down the military's long-term asset with
connections inside al-Qaeda? What if the CIA had worked with, instead
of against, the military? We will never know.

Zbigniew
Brzezinski and the CFR Put War Plans in a 1997 Book -- It is "A
Blueprint for World Dictatorship," Says a Former German Defense and
NATO Official Who Warned of Global Domination in 1984, in an Exclusive
Interview With FTW.

These are the very first words in
the book, "Ever since the continents started interacting politically,
some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world
power." -- p. xiii. Eurasia is all of the territory east of Germany and
Poland, stretching all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific
Ocean. It includes the Middle East and most of the Indian
subcontinent. The key to controlling Eurasia, says Brzezinski, is
controlling the Central Asian Republics. And the key to controlling the
Central Asian republics is Uzbekistan. Thus, it comes as no surprise
that Uzbekistan was forcefully mentioned by President George W. Bush in
his address to a joint session of Congress just days after the attacks
of September 11 as the very first place that the U.S. military would
be deployed.

As FTW has documented in previous
stories, major deployments of U.S. and British forces had taken place
before the attacks. And the U.S. Army and the CIA had been active in
Uzbekistan for several years. There is now evidence that what the world
is witnessing is a cold and calculated war plan -- at least four years
in the making -- and that, from reading Brzezinski's own words about
Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center attacks were just the trigger
needed to set the final conquest in motion.

FTW,
November 7, 2001, 1200 PST -- There's a quote often attributed to Allen
Dulles after it was noted that the final 1964 report of the Warren
Commission on the assassination of JFK contained dramatic
inconsistencies. Those inconsistencies, in effect, disproved the
Commission's own final conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone on
November 22, 1963. Dulles, a career spy, Wall Street lawyer, the CIA
director whom JFK had fired after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco -- and the
Warren Commission member who took charge of the investigation and
final report -- is reported to have said, "The American people don't
read."

Some Americans do read. So do Europeans and Asians and Africans and Latin Americans.

World
events since the attacks of September 11, 2001 have not only been
predicted, but also planned, orchestrated and -- as their architects
would like to believe -- controlled. The current Central Asian war is
not a response to terrorism, nor is it a reaction to Islamic
fundamentalism. It is in fact, in the words of one of the most powerful
men on the planet, the beginning of a final conflict before total world
domination by the United States leads to the dissolution of all
national governments. This, says Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
member and former Carter National Security Advisor, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, will lead to nation states being incorporated into a new
world order, controlled solely by economic interests as dictated by
banks, corporations and ruling elites concerned with the maintenance
(by manipulation and war) of their power. As a means of intimidation
for the unenlightened reader who happens upon this frightening plan --
the plan of the CFR -- Brzezinski offers the alternative of a world in
chaos unless the U.S. controls the planet by whatever means are
necessary and likely to succeed.

This position is
corroborated by Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, Ph.D. a former German defense
ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred
Werner. On November 6, he told FTW, "The interests behind the Bush
Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission ( founded by
Brzezinski for David Rockefeller -- and the Bliderberger Group, have
prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship
within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists.
They are fighting against citizens."

Brzezinski's own
words -- laid against the current official line that the United States
is waging a war to end terrorism -- are self-incriminating. In an
ongoing series of articles, FTW has consistently established that the
U.S. government had foreknowledge of the World Trade Center attacks and
chose not to stop them because it needed to secure public approval for
a war that is now in progress. It is a war, as described by Vice
President xxxx Cheney, "that may not end in our lifetimes." What that
means is that it will not end until all armed groups, anywhere in the
world, which possess the political, economic or military ability to
resist the imposition of this dictatorship, have been destroyed.

These
are the "terrorists" the U.S. now fights in Afghanistan and plans to
soon fight all over the globe. Before exposing Brzezinski (and those he
represents) with his own words, or hearing more from Dr. Koeppl, it is
worthwhile to take a look at Brzezinski's background. According to his
resume Brzezinski, holding a 1953 Ph.D. from Harvard, lists the
following achievements:

Counselor, Center for
Strategic and International Studies Professor of American Foreign
Policy, Johns Hopkins University National Security Advisor to President
Jimmy Carter (1977-81), Trustee and founder of the Trilateral
Commission, International advisor of several major US/Global
corporations, Associate of Henry Kissinger Under Ronald Reagan, member
of NSC-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy
Under Ronald Reagan, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board, Past member, Board of Directors, The Council on Foreign
Relations 1988, Co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task
Force.

Brzezinski is also a past attendee and
presenter at several conferences of the Bliderberger group -- a
non-partisan affiliation of the wealthiest and most powerful families
and corporations on the planet.

The Grand Chessboard

Brzezinski
sets the tone for his strategy by describing Russia and China as the
two most important countries -- almost but not quite superpowers -
whose interests that might threaten the U.S. in Central Asia. Of the
two, Brzezinski considers Russia to be the more serious threat. Both
nations border Central Asia. In a lesser context he describes the
Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Iran and Kazakhstan as essential "lesser" nations
that must be managed by the U.S. as buffers or counterweights to
Russian and Chinese moves to control the oil, gas and minerals of the
Central Asian Republics (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and
Kyrgyzstan).

He also notes, quite clearly (p.
53) that any nation that might become predominant in Central Asia would
directly threaten the current U.S. control of oil resources in the
Persian Gulf. In reading the book it becomes clear why the U.S. had a
direct motive for the looting of some $300 billion in Russian assets
during the 1990s, destabilizing Russia's currency (1998) and ensuring
that a weakened Russia would have to look westward to Europe for
economic and political survival, rather than southward to Central Asia.
A dependent Russia would lack the military, economic and political
clout to exert influence in the region and this weakening of Russia
would explain why Russian President Vladimir Putin has been such a
willing ally of U.S. efforts to date. (See FTW Vol. IV, No. 1 -- March
31, 2001)

An examination of selected quotes from
"The Grand Chessboard," in the context of current events reveals the
darker agenda behind military operations that were planned long before
September 11th, 2001.

"The last decade of the twentieth
century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first
time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter
of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power.
The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the
rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as
the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power) (p. xiii)

"But
in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges,
capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.
The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy
is therefore the purpose of this book. (p. xiv)

"The
attitude of the American public toward the external projection of
American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported
America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect
of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (pp 24-5)

"For
America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia) Now a non-Eurasian
power is preeminent in Eurasia -- and America's global primacy is
directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on
the Eurasian continent is sustained. (p.30)

"America's
withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a
successful rival -- would produce massive international instability. It
would prompt global anarchy." (p. 30)

"In that
context, how America `manages' Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the
globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that
dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced
and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also
suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail
Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania
geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75
per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's
physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and
underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP
and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)

Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary RobinCook (pictured above) told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda"
is not really a terrorist group but a database of international
mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel
guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy
of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an
important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a
former agent for French military intelligence.

"I
first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff
course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French
Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . . " Two
of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air
defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a
series of jokes about students' punishment.

"For
example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff
College, the two officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted in 'Q eidat
il-Maaloomaat' which meant 'You'll be logged in the information
database.' Meaning 'You will receive a warning . . .' If the case was
more severe, they would used to talk about 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.'
Meaning 'the decision database.' It meant 'you will be punished.' For
the worst cases they used to speak of logging in 'Al Qaida.'

"In
the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic
Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with
its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system
was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs.

"It
was decided to use a part of the system's memory to host the Islamic
Conference's database. It was possible for the countries attending to
access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The
governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies
in the world were connected to that network.

"[According
to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the
information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up
and send information they needed, and the decision file where the
decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored.
In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat
i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic
'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English
word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida
which is the Arabic word for "base." The military air base of Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a
base" and "Al Qaida" means "the base."

"In the
mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to
the communications of the Islamic Conference's secretariat.

"In
the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the
Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in
Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or
intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got
intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or
from Belgium.

"These documents contained directions
sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages
quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of
the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be
sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United
Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.

"Al
Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member
countries of the Islamic Conference are 'rogue states' and many
Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but
natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a
member of an important family in the banking and business world.

"Because
of the presence of 'rogue states,' it became easy for terrorist groups
to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was
used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families
of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training
in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in
action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by
all the 'rogue states' used to fight. And the 'rogue states' included
Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in
Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system
through coded or covert messages.

Meet "Al-Qaeda"

"Al
Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal
property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out
by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or
joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position
vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly
intended to 'punish' Prime Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid'
Islamic politician.

" . . . In the Third World the
general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction
for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact 'rogue
states," specially the US and other NATO countries.

"
Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the
'liberal" economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to
act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade
independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and
carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not
governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.

"The
truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida.
And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a
propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an
identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the
'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war
against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the
lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making
money." (Our emphasis, Ed.)

In yet another
example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December
2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military
court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO
bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in
1998. Bunel's case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the
details of the case classified. Bunel's character witnesses and
psychologists notwithstanding, the system "got him" for telling the
truth about Al Qaeda and who has
actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that
group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government
with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared
information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the
Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al Qaeda."

We
now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by
the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at
Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas
Feith.

French officer Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel, who knew the truth about "Al Qaeda" -- Another target of the neo-cons.

An extremist Muslim cleric, Abu Qatada, once known as late Osama bin
Laden’s aide, has been released from a British jail, Western and Arab
media reported on Tuesday. Qatada, who fled to Britain in 1993, was released on bail from the
Long Lartin high-security prison in central England late on Monday, Al
Arabiya said. According to the BBC, the British government said that Qatada, a
Jordanian of Palestinian origin, was a threat to UK national security.

The European Court on Human Rights however ruled not to extradite the
cleric to Jordan where he received a life sentence in absentia in 1999
for plotting terrorist attacks as he may be subjected to torture. A spokeswoman for the British Home Office told AFP that Britain “was united” in getting Qatada deported.

“This government will exhaust all avenues open to get Qatada on a
plane. If we do so, we will continue to negotiate with the Jordanians to
see what assurances we can be given about the evidence used against
Qatada in their court,” AFP quoted the spokeswoman as saying. According to the bail conditions, Qatada will be put under 22-hour
house arrest, allowed to leave his home for a maximum of one hour twice a
day. He is banned from using the internet and telephone as well as
attending a mosque.

Qatada is believed to have been the right-hand of bin Laden, the
former al Qaeda leader, who was killed in a U.S. raid in May, 2011.

An al-Qaida operative accused of bombing two Christian churches and a luxury hotel in Pakistan
in 2002 was at the same time working for British intelligence,
according to secret files on detainees who were shipped to the US
military's Guantánamo Bay prison camp. Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili,
an Algerian citizen described as a "facilitator, courier, kidnapper,
and assassin for al-Qaida", was detained in Pakistan in 2003 and later
sent to Guantánamo Bay. But according to Hamlili's Guantánamo
"assessment" file, one of 759 individual dossiers obtained by the
Guardian, US interrogators were convinced that he was simultaneously
acting as an informer for British and Canadian intelligence.

After
his capture in June 2003 Hamlili was transferred to Bagram detention
centre, north of Kabul, where he underwent numerous "custodial
interviews" with CIA personnel. They found him "to have withheld
important information from the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service and
British Secret Intelligence Service … and to be a threat to US and
allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan". The Guardian and the New
York Times published a series of reports based on the leaked cache of
documents which exposed the flimsy grounds on which many detainees
were transferred to the camp and portrayed a system focused
overwhelmingly on extracting intelligence from prisoners. A further series of reports based on the files reveal:

• A single star informer at the base won his freedom by incriminating at least 123 other prisoners
there. The US military source described Mohammed Basardah as an
"invaluable" source who had shown "exceptional co-operation", but
lawyers for other inmates claim his evidence is unreliable. • US
interrogators frequently clashed over the handling of detainees,
with members of the Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF GTMO) in several
cases overruling recommendations by the Criminal Investigative Task
Force (CITF) that prisoners should be released. CITF investigators also
disapproved of methods adopted by the JTF's military interrogators.

• New light on how Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora
as American and British special forces closed in on his mountain
refuge in December 2001, including intelligence claiming that a local
Pakistani warlord provided fighters to guide him to safety in the
north-east of Afghanistan.

The
Obama administration on Monday condemned the release of documents
which it claimed had been "obtained illegally by WikiLeaks". The
Pentagon's press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said in many cases the
documents, so-called Detainee Assessment Briefs, had been superseded
by the decisions of a taskforce established by President Barack Obama
in 2009. "Any given DAB illegally obtained and released by WikiLeaks
may or may not represent the current view of a given detainee," he
said.

According to the files,
Hamlili told his American interrogators at Bagram that he had been
running a carpet business from Peshawar, exporting as far afield as
Dubai following the 9/11 attacks. But his CIA captors knew the Algerian
had been an informant for MI6 and Canada's
Secret Intelligence Service for over three years – and suspected he
had been double-crossing handlers. According to US intelligence the two
spy agencies recruited Hamlili as a "humint" – human intelligence –
source in December 2000 "because of his connections to members of
various al-Qaida linked terrorist groups that operated in Afghanistan
and Pakistan".

The files do not
specify what information Hamlili withheld. But they do contain
intelligence reports, albeit flawed ones, that link the Algerian to
three major terrorist attacks in Pakistan during this time. Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed architect of the 9/11 attacks, told
interrogators an "Abu Adil" – an alias allegedly used by Hamlili –
had orchestrated the March 2002 grenade attack on a Protestant church
in Islamabad's diplomatic enclave that killed five people, including a
US diplomat and his daughter.

He
said Abu Adil was also responsible for an attack that killed three
girls in a rural Punjabi church the following December, and that he had
given him 300,000 rupees (about $3,540) to fund the attacks. The
church attacks have previously been blamed on Lashkar I Jhangvi, a
Pakistani sectarian outfit that has developed ties with al-Qaida in
recent years. Separately, US intelligence reports said that Hamlili
was "possibly involved" in a bombing outside Karachi's Sheraton hotel
in May 2002 that killed 11 French submarine engineers and two
Pakistanis.

But the intelligence
against the 35-year-old Algerian, who was sent home last January,
appears deeply flawed, like many of the accusations in the Guantánamo files.
Some of the information may have been obtained through torture. US
officials waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times at a CIA "black
site" in Thailand during his first month of captivity. And little
evidence is presented to link Hamlili to the Karachi hotel bombing,
other than that he ran a carpet business – the same cover that was used
by the alleged assassins to escape.

What
is clear, however, is that Hamlili was a decades-long veteran of the
violent jihadi underground that extends from northern Pakistan and
Afghanistan into north Africa. From the Algerian town of Oran, he left
with his father in 1986, at the age of 11, to join the fight against
Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Later he fell into extremist "takfir"
groups, recruited militants to fight in the Algerian civil war, and
gained a reputation for violence. Under the Taliban the Algerian worked
as a translator for the foreign ministry and later for the Taliban
intelligence services, shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan in
the runup to 9/11.

Last January
Hamlili and another inmate, Hasan Zemiri, were transferred to Algerian
government custody. It was not clear whether they would be freed or
made to stand trial. Clive Stafford Smith, whose legal charity,
Reprieve, represents many current and former inmates, said the files
revealed the "sheer bureaucratic incompetence"
of the US military's intelligence gathering. "When you gather
intelligence in such an unintelligent way; if for example you sweep
people up who you know are innocent, and it is in these documents; and
then mistreat them horribly, you are not going to get reliable
intelligence. You are going to make yourself a lot of enemies."

The
Guantánamo files are one of a series of secret US government
databases allegedly leaked by US intelligence analyst Bradley Manning
to WikiLeaks. The New York Times, which shared the files with the
Guardian and US National Public Radio, said it did not obtain them
from WikiLeaks. A number of other news organisations yesterday
published reports based on files they had received from WikiLeaks.

Fox News: Al Qaeda Leader Dined at the Pentagon Just Months After 9/11

Anwar Al-Awlaki may be the first American on the CIA's kill or capture list, but he was also a lunch guest of military brass at the Pentagon
within months
of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Fox News has
learned. Documents exclusively obtained by Fox News,
including an FBI interview conducted after the Fort Hood shooting in
November 2009, state that Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon as part of
the military’s outreach to the Muslim community in the immediate
aftermath of the attacks.

The incident was flagged by a current
Defense Department employee who came forward and told investigators she
helped arrange the meeting after she saw Awlaki speak in Alexandria,
Va. The employee "attended this talk and while she arrived late she recalls being impressed by this imam. He condemned Al Qaeda
and the terrorist attacks. During his talk he was 'harassed' by members
of the audience and suffered it well," reads one document.

According to the documents, obtained as part
of an ongoing investigation by the specials unit "Fox News Reporting,"
there was a push within the Defense Department to reach out to the
Muslim community. "At that period in time, the secretary of the Army (redacted) was eager to have a presentation from a moderate Muslim."

In addition, Awlaki "was considered to be an
'up and coming' member of the Islamic community. After her vetting,
Aulaqi (Awlaki) was invited to and attended a luncheon at the Pentagon
in the secretary of the Army's Office of Government Counsel."

Awlaki, a Yemeni-American who was born in
Las Cruces, N.M., was interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the
first week after the attacks because of his ties to the three hijackers
Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour. The three hijackers
were all onboard Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon. Awlaki is now believed to be hiding in Yemen after he was linked to the
alleged Ft. Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who e-mailed Awlaki
prior to the attack.

Sources told Fox News that Awlaki, who is a
former Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, met with the
Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Yemen and was the
middle-man between the young Nigerian and the bombmaker. Awlaki was also
said to inspire would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. Apparently, none of the FBI's information
about Awlaki was shared with the Pentagon. Former Army Secretary Tommy
White, who led the Army in 2001, said he doesn't have any recollection
of the luncheon or any contact with Awlaki.

"If this was a luncheon at the Office of Government Counsel, I would not necessarily be there," he said. The Pentagon has offered no explanation of
how a man, now on the CIA kills or capture list, ended up at a special
lunch for Muslim outreach. After repeated requests for comment on the
vetting process beginning on October 13th, an Army spokesman insisted
Wednesday that the lunch was not an Army event. "The Army has found no
evidence that the Army either sponsored or participated in the event
described in this report," spokesman Thomas Collins said.

Collins also noted that the FBI document
referred to the “Office of Government Counsel” but should read “Office
of General Counsel.” Collins said he believed the event was
sponsored by the office of the Secretary of Defense. A spokeswoman there
said she would look into it and get back to Fox News.

A former high-ranking FBI agent told Fox
News that at the time Awlaki went to lunch at the Pentagon, there was
tremendous "arrogance" about the vetting process at the Pentagon. "They vetted people politically and showed
indifference toward security and intelligence advice of others," the
former agent said.

A lawsuit brought against Saudi Arabia by families of Sept. 11 victims and
others claims there is a connection

Top secret information on the Saudi Arabia’s activities around the time
of the September 11, 2001 suggest the Saudi government might have played
a direct role in the terrorist attacks, according to two former U.S. senators privy to such information. In a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that has made its way through
federal courts since 2002, plaintiffs are taking legal action against
the Saudi government and dozens of institutions in the country for their
alleged ties to al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11. The case is set to be
reheard in United States District Court in Manhattan in the coming
months.

“I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of
the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the
government of Saudi Arabia,” former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of
Florida said in an affidavit. Graham led a joint 2002 Congressional
inquiry into the 9/11 attacks.

Another former senator, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, also served on that
inquiry and said in a his own sworn affidavit that “significant
questions remain unanswered” about the role of Saudi institutions.
“Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi
government agents in the September 11th attacks has never been fully
pursued,” Mr. Kerrey said.

Lawyers for the Saudis in the case as well as officials at the Saudi
Embassy in Washington have declined to comment on the case. The Saudi
government has denied the accusations of involvement and have sought to
have the case dismissed.

The classified evidence seen by Graham and Kerrey has not been disclosed, but the New York Timesreports,
“unanswered questions include the work of a number of Saudi-sponsored
charities with financial links to Al Qaeda, as well as the role of a
Saudi citizen living in San Diego at the time of the attacks, Omar
al-Bayoumi, who had ties to two of the hijackers and to Saudi
officials.”

Despite these known concerns, or “unanswered questions,” Washington
has kept up extremely close ties to the Saudi government, giving them
huge annual arms packages and constantly referring to them as our close
allies. More than that, U.S. foreign aggression since 9/11 has almost
always had a pretext of fighting terrorism, state sponsors of terror, or
those with ties to terrorists. All of those cases of U.S. aggression
appear to have had less evidence of ties to al-Qaeda than Saudi Arabia.

American authorities sent David C. Headley,
a small-time drug dealer and sometime informant, to work for them in
Pakistan months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, despite a warning
that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups, according to court
records and interviews. Not long after Mr. Headley arrived there, he
began training with terrorists, eventually playing a key role in the
2008 attacks that left 164 people dead in Mumbai. The October 2001 warning was dismissed, the authorities said, as the
ire of a jilted girlfriend and for lack of proof. Less than a month
later, those concerns did not come up when a federal court in New York
granted Mr. Headley an early release from probation so that he could be
sent to work for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in Pakistan. It is unclear what Mr. Headley was supposed to do in Pakistan for the Americans.

“All I knew was the D.E.A. wanted him in Pakistan as fast as possible
because they said they were close to making some big cases,” said Luis
Caso, Mr. Headley’s former probation officer.

On Sunday, while President Obama was visiting India, he briefed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
on the status of his administration’s investigation of Mr. Headley,
including the failure to act on repeated warnings that he might be a
terrorist. A senior United States official said the inquiry has
concluded that while the government received warnings, it did not have
strong enough evidence at the time to act on them. “Had the United
States government sufficiently established he was engaged in plotting a
terrorist attack in India, the information would have most assuredly
been transferred promptly to the Indian government,” the official said
in a statement to The New York Times. The statement did not make clear
whether any American agencies would be held accountable.

In recent weeks, United States government officials have begun to
acknowledge that Mr. Headley’s path from American informant to
transnational terrorist illustrates the breakdowns and
miscommunications that have bedeviled them since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Warnings about his radicalism were apparently not shared with the drug
agency that made use of his ties in Pakistan. The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.,
began an investigation into Mr. Headley’s government connections after
reports last month that two of the former drug dealer’s ex-wives had
gone to American authorities between 2005 and 2008, before the Mumbai
attacks, to say they feared he was plotting with terrorists. Combined
with the earlier warning from the former girlfriend, three of the women
in Mr. Headley’s life reported his ties to terrorists, only to have
those warnings dismissed.

An examination of Mr. Headley’s story shows that his government ties
ran far deeper and longer than previously known. One senior American
official knowledgeable about the case said he believed that Mr. Headley
was a D.E.A. informant until at least 2003, meaning that he was talking
to American agencies even as he was learning to deal with explosives
and small arms in terrorist training camps. The review raises new questions about why the Americans missed warning
signs that a valued informant was becoming an important figure in
radical Islamic groups, and whether some officials chose to look the
other way rather than believe the complaints about him. The October
2001 warning from the girlfriend was first reported Friday by
ProPublica, the independent investigative news operation, and published
in The Washington Post.

Fuller details of how the government handled the matter were provided
to The Times by officials who did not want to be quoted discussing a
continuing inquiry. They disclosed that the F.B.I.
actually talked to Mr. Headley about the girlfriend, and he told them
she was unreliable. They said that while he seemed to have a
philosophical affinity for some groups, there was no evidence that he
was plotting against the United States. Also influencing the handling
of the case, they said, was that he had been a longtime informant. The
Indian government has been outspoken in its concerns that the
United States overlooked repeated warnings about Mr. Headley’s
terrorist activities because of his links to both American law
enforcement as well as to officials in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate — a key ally of the United States in the fight against terrorism.

Bruce O. Riedel, a terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution and a former C.I.A.
officer, said the Indians were right to ask, “ ‘Why weren’t alarms
screaming?’ ”Mr. Headley, 50, born in the United States to a Pakistani
diplomat and
Philadelphia socialite, has pleaded guilty in connection with the
Mumbai plot and a thwarted attack against a Danish newspaper that
published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. As he has many times
before, he is cooperating with the authorities, this time hoping to
avoid the death penalty. Officials of the D.E.A., which has a long
history with Mr. Headley, declined to discuss their relationship with
him. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. said that Mr. Headley had never worked
with them. Privately, the agencies point fingers at each other.

The transcript of a Nov. 16, 2001, probation hearing in federal court
in New York shows the government took great pains not to identify which
agency was handling Mr. Headley, or whether he worked for more than
one. Mr. Caso, his former probation officer, recalled that Mr. Headley
had
been turned over to the D.E.A. Another person familiar with the case
confirms this account. It was a world Mr. Headley knew well. After
arrests in 1987 and 1998, he cooperated with the drug agency in
exchange for lighter sentences. He specialized in the ties between
Pakistani drug organizations and American dealers along the East Coast. A
September 1998 letter that prosecutors submitted to court after an
arrest then showed that the government considered Mr. Headley — who had
admitted to distributing 15 kilograms of heroin over his years as a
dealer — so “reliable and forthcoming,” that they sent him to Pakistan
to “develop intelligence on Pakistani heroin traffickers.”

The letter indicates that Mr. Headley, who faced seven to nine years in
prison for his offense, was such a trusted partner to the drug agency
in the 1990s that he helped translate hours of tape-recorded telephone
intercepts, and coached drug agency investigators on how to question
Pakistani suspects. The courts looked favorably on his cooperation,
according to records, sentencing Mr. Headley to 15 months in prison,
and five years’ probation. While he was on probation, in October 2001, a woman told the F.B.I.
that she believed her former boyfriend, Mr. Headley, was sympathetic to
extremist groups in Pakistan, according to a senior American official
who has been briefed on the case.

The government was flooded with
thousands of such tips at that time, in the aftermath of the 9/11
attacks. William Headley, an uncle, recalled that agents called his sister to
ask if her son had terrorist leanings. “She didn’t seem upset at all by
the call,” William Headley said. “And I didn’t think much of it either
because at that time, I thought the government was checking out anyone
who had ties to Pakistan.”

It is unclear how widely disseminated the warning was. But in that
probation hearing one month later, the government enlisted Mr.
Headley’s help again, suspending his sentence in exchange for what
court records described only as “continuing cooperation.” According to
the transcript, it was a rushed affair. The probation officer
apologized for not being properly dressed, and the lawyers explained
that they had not been able to make their case in writing. Mr. Headley
was a potential gold mine, according to an official knowledgeable about
the agreement to release him from probation. One person involved in the
case said American agencies had “zero in terms of reliable
intelligence. And it was clear from the conversations about him that
the government was considering assignments that went beyond drugs.”

American authorities have not disclosed what happened after Mr. Headley
resumed his role as an informant. But in December 2001, the same month
Mr. Headley departed for Pakistan, the United States designated the
Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba
as a terrorist organization. Less than two months later — in February
2002 — Mr. Headley began training with the group on “the merits of
waging jihad.” Between 2002 and 2005, Mr. Headley attended at least four additional
Lashkar sessions, including training on surveillance and small-arms
combat. Then in 2007, he began scouting targets for the group to attack
in Mumbai, staying at least twice at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower
hotel, and hiring fishermen for private tours of the port that helped
him identify where the sea-traveling attackers could land. It is
unclear when and why his connections to the United States government
ended.

After the Mumbai attacks, Mr. Headley apparently turned his attention
to Europe, according to recently released transcripts of his
questioning by the Indian authorities. He contacted Ilyas Kashmiri,
widely considered one of Al Qaeda’s
most dangerous operatives, and begin plotting the attack against the
Danish newspaper, according to his own account. Mr. Kashmiri put Mr.
Headley in touch with Qaeda operatives in Europe who would help. He
traveled to Britain in August 2009, then to Stockholm. British intelligence authorities alerted the United States to Mr.
Headley’s August meeting in Britain, saying that they believed he was
involved in a plot against the Denmark newspaper. He was arrested in
connection with the Denmark plot last October.

American authorities had no idea that he was also involved in the
Mumbai attacks until he told them. Since then, he has been in federal
custody in Chicago. An American counterterrorism official said that agents who had
questioned Mr. Headley called him “dangerously engaging.” The official
said Mr. Headley was “a very charming individual who clearly knows how
to manipulate the system to get what he wants” and added that agents
steeled themselves before meeting with him so as not to “get sucked
into his mind games.”

Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in
Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in
Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David C. Headley, was plotting an attack. It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were
warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the
United States Drug Enforcement Administration
whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move
easily in both worlds. Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman
who was also married to
the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that
she believed he was a member of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.

Despite those warnings by two of his three wives, Mr. Headley roamed
far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving
training in small-caliber weapons and countersurveillance, scouting
targets for attacks, and building a network of connections that
extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless northwestern frontier. Then
in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that
set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended
to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and
India. An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements in the years before
the
bombing, based on interviews in Washington, Pakistan, India and
Morocco, shows that he had overlapping, even baffling, contacts among
seemingly disparate groups — Pakistani intelligence, terrorists, and
American drug investigators.

Those ties are rekindling concerns that the Mumbai bombings represent
another communications breakdown in the fight against terrorism, and
are raising the question of whether United States officials were
reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had
been an informant for the D.E.A. More significantly, they may indicate American wariness to pursue
evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war
against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans. The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A.,
did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence
to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or
retired ISI officers probably played some role.

It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they
had gotten about Mr. Headley, who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and
is cooperating with authorities, or whether they saw them as complaints
from wives whose motives might be colored by strained relations with
their husband. Federal officials say that the State Department and the F.B.I.
investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley at the time,
but that they could not confirm any connections between him and
Lashkar-e-Taiba. D.E.A. officials have said they ended their
association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr.
Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training. But some
Indian officials say they suspect that Mr. Headley’s contacts with the
American drug agency lasted much longer.

The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005
warning from Mr. Headley’s American former wife on its Web site and in
the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she
told the authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an
American informant while he trained with Lashkar. On Saturday, Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council,
said in a statement, “The United States regularly provided threat
information to Indian officials in 2008 before the attacks in Mumbai.”
He also said, “Had we known about the timing and other specifics
related to the Mumbai attacks, we would have immediately shared those
details with the government of India.” Mr. Headley’s American wife was not the only one to come forward. The
Moroccan wife described her separate warnings in an interview with The
New York Times. Interviews with United States and allied intelligence
and security officials illustrate his longstanding connections to
American law enforcement and the ISI:

An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in
early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as
a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony
to Indian investigators in Chicago in June. As part of Mr. Headley’s
plea agreement, Indian investigators were allowed to interview him in
Chicago, where he was arrested in October 2009. The ISI officer who
gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Major Iqbal, served as the
supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications
system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel,
according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians. While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr.
Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian
agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American
official said.

Besides Mr. Headley’s guilty plea in a United States court, seven
Pakistani suspects have been charged there. American investigators say
a critical figure who has not been charged is Sajid Mir, a Lashkar
operative who became close to Mr. Headley as the plans for the Mumbai
operation unfolded. The investigators fear he is still working on other
plots. Mr. Headley was known both to Pakistani and American security officials
long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military
high school in Pakistan. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on
drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A.
informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan
and the United States. In several interviews in her home, Mr. Headley’s
Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, described the warnings she gave to
American officials less than a year before gunmen attacked several
popular tourist attractions in Mumbai. She claims she even showed the
embassy officials a photo of Mr. Headley and herself in the Taj Mahal
Hotel, where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. Hotel records
confirm their stay.

Ms. Outalha, 27, said that in two meetings with American officials at
the United States Embassy in Islamabad, she told the authorities that
her husband had many friends who were known members of Lashkar-e-Taiba.
She said she told them that he was passionately anti-Indian, but that
he traveled to India all the time for business deals that never seemed
to amount to much. And she said she told them Mr. Headley assumed different identities: as
a devout Muslim who went by the name Daood when he was in Pakistan, and
as an American playboy named David, when he was in India.

“I told them, he’s either a terrorist, or he’s working for you,” she
recalled saying to American officials at the United States Embassy in
Islamabad. “Indirectly, they told me to get lost.”

Though there are lots of gaping holes left in Mr. Headley’s public
profile, the one thing that is clear is he assumed multiple personas.
He was born in the United States, the son of a Pakistani diplomat and a
socialite from Philadelphia’s Main Line. When he was about a year old,
his parents took him to Pakistan, where he attended the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, the country’s oldest military boarding school, just outside of Islamabad.

Mr. Headley’s parents divorced. And before he finished high school, he
moved to Philadelphia to help his American mother run a bar, called the
Khyber Pass. Later he opened a couple of video rental stores. But at
the same time he was involved in a life of crime. Each time he
was arrested on drug trafficking charges, he used his roots in the
United States and Pakistan to make himself as valuable an asset to law
enforcement as he was to the traffickers — one with the looks and
passports to move easily across borders, and the charisma to penetrate
secretive organizations. He was married at least three times. For one
period he was married to
all three wives — Ms. Outalha, who is a medical student half his age; a
New York makeup artist; and a conservative Pakistani Muslim — at the
same time.

Those relationships, however, caused him trouble. In 2005, his American
wife filed domestic abuse charges against Mr. Headley, according to
federal investigators in New York, and reported his ties to
Lashkar-e-Taiba. The investigators said the tip was passed on to the
F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Then in December 2007, Ms. Outalha talked her way into the heavily
guarded American Embassy in Islamabad. She went back a month later with
more information. A senior administration official acknowledged that
Ms. Outalha met twice with an assistant regional security officer and
an Immigration and Customs Enforcement
officer at the embassy. However, the administration official said Ms.
Outalha offered almost no details to give credibility to her warnings.

“The texture of the meeting was that her husband was involved with bad
people, and they were planning jihad,” the official said. “But she gave
no details about who was involved, or what they planned to target.”

Given that she had been jilted, Ms. Outalha acknowledged she may not
have been composed. “I wanted him in Guantánamo,” she said. More than
that, however, Ms. Outalha says, she went to the American authorities
looking for answers to questions about Mr. Headley’s real identity. In
public he criticized the United States for the war in Iraq and
Afghanistan. But at night he loved watching “Seinfeld” and Jay Leno.

Sipping tea in a cafe overlooking a plaza in Morocco, Ms.
Outalha said
that in hindsight, she is convinced that he is both men. She claims to
be puzzled that American officials did not heed her warning. “I told
them anything I could to get their attention,” she said of the
American authorities at the embassy in Islamabad. “It was as if I was
shouting, ‘This guy was a terrorist! You have to do something.’ ”

General Hamid Gul, the former head of the Pakistani ISI, told CNN
yesterday that both the Mumbai attacks and 9/11 were “inside jobs,”
much to the chagrin of host and CFR luminary Fareed Zakaria, who told
viewers that Gul’s opinions were “absolutely wrong and thoroughly
discredited”. “When you look at the full spectrum of possibilities,
who could have done it, then one knows that Samjhauta Express was a
similar case, in which Pakistan ISI was accused. But it turned out that
it was the militant Hindus themselves who had killed 68 passengers in
that train, and that it was an inside job,” said Gul.

“Now Colonel Srikant Purohit, who is a serving army officer, he has
been caught in this particular case. And the whole thing has turned
around.” “So, obviously, there is an inside job.”

The revelation that Mukhtar Ahmed, a “counterinsurgency
police officer who may have been on an undercover mission” working for
Indian authorities was arrested for illegally buying mobile phone cards used by the Mumbai gunmen, allied with the numerous intelligence warnings proving that the method, arrival and targets of attack were all known well in advance,
proves Gul right in his assertion that the terrorists could not have
achieved such carnage without help from people on the inside. Asked by Zakaria, “What is your hunch as to who did – who
perpetrated the 9/11 attacks?,” Gul responded, “Well, I have been on
record, and I said it is the Zionists or the neocons. They have done
it. It was an inside job.” “And they wanted to go on the world conquerors. They were looking
upon it as an opportunity window, when the Muslim world was lying
prostrate. Russia was nowhere in sight. China was still not an economic
giant that is has turned out to be.”

“And they thought that this was a good time to go and
fill those
strategic areas, which are still lying without any American presence.
And, of course, to control the energy tap of the world.” “Presently, it
is the Middle East, and in future it is going to be Central Asia,” added
Gul. Gul told Zakaria that the evidence for 9/11 being
planned by Osama Bin Laden and executed by Al-Qaeda has not emerged and
that the events are still “shrouded in mystery”.

“A lot of people have a lot of
misgivings about that.
And it’s not only me. I think a lot of people in America would be
thinking the same way. There are scientists, there are scholars, who
have written articles on it,” added Gul, calling for President elect
Barack Obama to set up a new commission to investigate the attacks. Gul
said the attacks were planned inside America by people with a dangerous
agenda who have “turned the world upside-down”.

Returning from a commercial break, Zakaria, editor of Newsweek, Council on Foreign Relations kingpin and also a Trilateral Commission board member,
told his viewers, “Some of General Gul’s views are simply false. There
is a mountain of evidence about 9/11 that refutes his assertions,” but
Zakaria failed to cite any of it. Zakaria was then joined by counter-insurgency expert
David Kilcullen who said that the Mumbai attacks bore all the hallmarks
of a “clandestine operation or a covert operation style activity,” but
when pressed he refused to directly implicate Pakistan in the attack.

For
25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest
divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an
earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired
family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school. To Israel,
he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking
clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.
Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of
betraying his country to an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his
friends and former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of his
deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad, the unexplained cash,
the secret second wife.

Lebanese investigators say he
has confessed to a career of espionage spectacular in its scope and
longevity, a real-life John le Carré novel. Many intelligence agents are
said to operate in the civil chaos of Lebanon, but Mr. Jarrah’s arrest
has shed a rare light onto a world of spying and subversion that usually
persists in secret. Mr. Jarrah’s first wife maintains that he was
tortured, and is innocent; requests to interview him were denied. From
his home in this Bekaa Valley village, Mr. Jarrah, 50, traveled often to
Syria and to south Lebanon, where he photographed roads and convoys
that might have been used to transport weapons to Hezbollah, the Shiite
militant group, investigators say. He spoke with his handlers by
satellite phone, receiving “dead drops” of money, cameras and listening
devices. Occasionally, on the pretext of a business trip, he traveled to
Belgium and Italy, received an Israeli passport, and flew to Israel,
where he was debriefed at length, investigators say.

At the start
of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli officials called
Mr. Jarrah to reassure him that his village would be spared and that he
should stay at home, investigators said. He was finally arrested last
July by Hezbollah, which now has perhaps the most powerful intelligence
apparatus in this country. It handed him to the Lebanese military —
along with his brother Yusuf, who is accused of helping him spy — and he
awaits trial by a military court. Several current and former military
officials agreed to provide details about his case on condition of
anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss it before the
trial began. Their accounts tallied with details provided by Mr.
Jarrah’s relatives and former colleagues.

It
is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s
cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart
in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Mark
Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declined
to discuss Mr. Jarrah’s situation, saying, “It is not our practice to
publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”
Villagers here seemed incredulous that a man they knew all their lives
could have taken money to spy for a country that they regard with
unmixed hatred and disgust. Many maintained his innocence. But Raja
Mosleh, the Palestinian doctor who was his partner for years in a school
and health clinic near here, did not. “I never suspected him before,”
Dr. Mosleh said. “But now, after linking all the incidents together, I
feel he’s 100 percent guilty.” “He used to talk about the Palestinian
cause all the time, how he supported the cause, he supported the people,
he liked everybody — this son of a dog,” Dr. Mosleh added, his voice
thick with contempt.

Mr. Jarrah would often borrow money to buy
cigarettes, apparently posing as a man of limited means. Investigators
say he received more than $300,000 for his work from Israel. Only
recently did he begin to spend in ways that raised questions. About six
years ago, neighbors said, he built a three-story villa with a
terra-cotta roof that is by far the grandest house in this modest
village of low concrete dwellings. Outside is a small roofed archway and
a heavy iron gate, and on a recent day a German shepherd stood guard.
Dr. Mosleh asked him where he got the money, and Mr. Jarrah said he got
help from a daughter living in Brazil. It is a natural excuse in
Lebanon, where a large portion of the population receives remittances
from relatives abroad.

Mr. Jarrah also had a secret second wife,
according to investigators and his former colleagues. Unlike his first
wife, Maryam Shmouri al-Jarrah, who lived in relative grandeur with
their five children in Maraj, the second wife lived in a cheap apartment
in the town of Masnaa, near the Syrian border. This apparently allowed
Mr. Jarrah to travel near the border in the unremarkable guise of a
local working-class man. Mr. Jarrah has said he was recruited in 1983 — a
year after Israel began a major invasion of Lebanon — by Israeli
officers who had imprisoned him, according to investigators. He was
offered regular payments in exchange for information about Palestinian
militants and Syrian troop movements, they said. After Israel withdrew
from Lebanon in 2000, thousands of Lebanese from the occupied zone in
the south were tried and sentenced — mostly to light prison terms — for
collaborating with Israel.

Far from the border, a different class
of collaborators, rooted in their communities, persisted. A few have
been caught and sentenced. Mr. Jarrah’s motives remain a mystery. He
said he tried to stop, but the Israelis would not let him, investigators
said. It all came to an end last summer. He went on a trip to Syria in
July, and when he returned he said he had been briefly detained by the
Syrian police, his first wife said. He seemed very uneasy, not his usual
self, she said. He left the house that night, saying he was going to
Beirut, and never returned, Mrs. Jarrah said. Only three months later
did she get a call from the Lebanese Army saying it had taken custody of
him. A few weeks ago, Mrs. Jarrah said, she was allowed to see him. He
looked terrible, exhausted, she said. Lebanese security forces released a
photograph of Mr. Jarrah, taken before his arrest. In it, he appears
against a blue and white backdrop, dressed in a formal dark shirt,
wearing an enigmatic smile.

Documents
show Raymond Davis, an American who killed two Pakistanis in Lahore in
January, had links with CIA's espionage and sabotage plans in the Asian
country.

“The documents, photographs and the
evidence that has come out from Davis' sofa almost confirms his links
with Taliban terrorism…the attacks on ISI and the security establishment
as well as the drone attacks,” Pakistani defense analyst and security
consultant Zaid Hamid said in an interview with Press TV's US Desk on
Saturday.

Hamid added that there is evidence confirming Davis has been a US undercover operative in Pakistan.
“With this kind of evidence the issue is not just the assassination
of those two boys on the streets of Lahore but it is an indication of a
much larger network of CIA espionage and sabotage inside Pakistan,” he
said.
Earlier, US President Barack Obama urged Pakistan to free the US
official saying he enjoys diplomatic immunity under the Vienna
Convention.

However, under public pressure, Lahore High Court adjourned a decision on whether Davis had diplomatic immunity.
The court gave the foreign ministry more time to answer on whether
full diplomatic status was held by Davis, who has been remanded in
custody since his arrest following the incident on January 27.
Pakistani police have pressed charges of espionage against Davis,
saying he is an employee of the notorious US security firm
Xe/Blackwater, working in Pakistan under the cover of the so-called war
on terror.

“America, you from America?” “Yes.” “You’re from America, and you belong to the American Embassy?” “Yes,” the American voice said loudly above the chatter. “My passport —
at the site I showed the police officer. . . . It’s somewhere. It’s
lost.”

On the jumpy video footage of the interrogation, he reached beneath his
checkered flannel shirt and produced a jumble of identification badges
hanging around his neck. “This is an old badge. This is Islamabad.” He
showed the badge to the man across the desk and then flipped to a more
recent one proving his employment in the American Consulate in Lahore.

“You are working at the consulate general in Lahore?” the policeman asked. “Yes.” “As a . . . ?” “I, I just work as a consultant there.” “Consultant?” The man behind the desk paused for a moment and then shot a
question in Urdu to another policeman. “And what’s the name?” “Raymond Davis,” the officer responded. “Raymond Davis,” the American confirmed. “Can I sit down?” “Please do. Give you water?” the officer asked. “Do you have a bottle? A bottle of water?” Davis asked. Another officer in the room laughed. “You want water?” he asked. “No money, no water.” Another policeman walked into the room and asked for an update. “Is he
understanding everything? And he just killed two men?”

Hours earlier, Davis had been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his
thick frame wedged into the driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city
once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs and the British, Lahore is Pakistan’s
cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade it had been
on the fringes of America’s secret war in Pakistan. But the map of
Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn in recent years, and
factions that once had little contact with one another had cemented new
alliances in response to the C.I.A.’s drone campaign in the western
mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up
bloody attacks against India were now aligning themselves closer to Al
Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of
these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was why Davis and a C.I.A.
team set up operations from a safe house in the city.

But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two
young men who approached his car on a black motorcycle, their guns
drawn, at an intersection congested with cars, bicycles and rickshaws.
Davis took his semiautomatic Glock pistol and shot through the
windshield, shattering the glass and hitting one of the men numerous
times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car and shot several
rounds into his back.

He radioed the American Consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota
Land Cruiser was in sight, careering in the wrong direction down a
one-way street. But the S.U.V. struck and killed a young Pakistani
motorcyclist and then drove away. An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia
was found, including a black mask, approximately 100 bullets and a
piece of cloth bearing an American flag. The camera inside Davis’s car
contained photos of Pakistani military installations, taken
surreptitiously.

More than two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely
forgotten in the United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the
dramatic raid months later that killed Osama bin Laden — consigned to a
footnote in the doleful narrative of America’s relationship with
Pakistan. But dozens of interviews conducted over several months, with
government officials and intelligence officers in Pakistan and in the
United States, tell a different story: that the real unraveling of the
relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis unleashed on the
afternoon of Jan. 27, 2011, and exacerbated by a series of misguided
decisions in the days and weeks that followed. In Pakistan, it is the
Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in
the country’s crowded bazaars and corridors of power.

Davis was taken to Kot Lakhpat prison, on the
industrial fringes of Lahore, a jail with a reputation for inmates dying
under murky circumstances. He was separated from the rest of the
prisoners and held in a section of the decaying facility where the
guards didn’t carry weapons, a concession for his safety that American
officials managed to extract from the prison staff. The United States
Consulate in Lahore had negotiated another safeguard: A small team of
dogs was tasting Davis’s food, checking that it had not been laced with
poison.

For many senior Pakistani spies, the man sitting in the jail cell
represented solid proof of their suspicions that the C.I.A. had sent a
vast secret army to Pakistan, men who sowed chaos and violence as part
of the covert American war in the country. For the C.I.A., the eventual
disclosure of Davis’s role with the agency shed an unflattering light on
a post–Sept. 11 reality: that the C.I.A. had farmed out some of its
most sensitive jobs to outside contractors — many of them with neither
the experience nor the temperament to work in the war zones of the
Islamic world.

The third child of a bricklayer and a cook, Davis grew up in a small
clapboard house outside Big Stone Gap, a town of nearly 6,000 people in
Virginia coal country. He became a football and wrestling star at the
local high school, and after graduating in 1993, Davis enlisted in the
Army and did a tour in Macedonia in 1994 as a United Nations
peacekeeper. When his five-year hitch in the infantry was up, he
re-enlisted, this time in the Army’s Third Special Forces Group based at
Fort Bragg, N.C. He left the Army in 2003 and, like hundreds of other
retired Navy SEALs and Green Berets, was hired by the private security
firm Blackwater and soon found himself in Iraq working security for the
C.I.A.

Little is known about his work for Blackwater, but by 2006, Davis had
left the firm and, together with his wife, founded a security company in
Las Vegas. Soon he was hired by the C.I.A. as a private contractor,
what the agency calls a “Green Badge,” for the color of the
identification cards that contractors show to enter C.I.A. headquarters
at Langley. Like Davis, many of the contractors were hired to fill out
the C.I.A.’s Global Response Staff — bodyguards who traveled to war
zones to protect case officers, assess the security of potential meeting
spots, even make initial contact with sources to ensure that case
officers wouldn’t be walking into an ambush. Officers from the C.I.A.’s
security branch came under withering fire on the roof of the agency’s
base in Benghazi, Libya, last September. The demands of the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan had so stretched the C.I.A.’s own cadre of security
officers that the agency was forced to pay inflated sums to private
contractors to do the security jobs. When Davis first deployed with the
C.I.A. to Pakistan in 2008, he worked from the agency’s base in
Peshawar, earning upward of $200,000 a year.

By mid-February 2011, with Davis still sitting in prison, anti-American
passions were fully inflamed, and daily street protests and newspaper
editorials demanded that the government not cave to Washington’s demands
for Davis’s release but instead sentence him to death. The evidence at
the time indicated that the men Davis killed had carried out a string of
petty thefts that day, but there was an added problem: the third man
killed by the unmarked American S.U.V. fleeing the scene. Making matters
even worse for Davis was the fact that he was imprisoned in Lahore,
where the family of Nawaz Sharif dominated the political culture. The
former leader of the country made no secret about his intentions to once
again run Pakistan, making him the chief antagonist to President Asif
Ali Zardari and his political machine in Islamabad, a four-hour drive
away. As the American Embassy in Islamabad leaned on Zardari’s
government to get Davis released from jail, the diplomats soon realized
that Zardari had little influence over the police officers and judges in
the city of the president’s bitter rival.

But the most significant factor ensuring that Davis would languish in
jail was that the Obama administration had yet to tell Pakistan’s
government what the Pakistanis already suspected, and what Raymond
Davis’s marksmanship made clear: He wasn’t just another paper-shuffling
American diplomat. Davis’s work in Pakistan was much darker, and it
involved probing an exposed nerve in the already-hypersensitive
relationship between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s military intelligence
service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I.

Ever since the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba
(the Army of the Pure) dispatched teams of assassins to lay siege to
luxury hotels and other sites in Mumbai, India, in November 2008,
killing and wounding more than 500 people over four days of mayhem,
C.I.A. analysts had been warning that the group was seeking to raise its
global profile by carrying out spectacular attacks beyond South Asia.
This spurred the agency to assign more of its expanding army of
operatives in Pakistan toward gathering intelligence about Lashkar’s
operations — a decision that put the interests of the C.I.A. and the
I.S.I. in direct conflict. It was one thing for American spies to be
lurking around the tribal areas, hunting for Al Qaeda figures; it was
quite another to go into Pakistani cities on espionage missions against a
group that the I.S.I. considered a valuable proxy force in its
continuing battle with India.

The I.S.I. had nurtured the group for years as a useful asset against
India, and Lashkar’s sprawling headquarters outside Lahore housed a
radical madrassa, a market, a hospital, even a fish farm. The group’s
charismatic leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, had been put under house
arrest at various times, but in 2009 the Lahore High Court quashed all
terrorism charges against him and set him free. A stocky man with a wild
beard, Saeed preached out in the open on many Fridays, flanked by
bodyguards and delivering sermons to throngs of his followers about the
imperialism of the United States, India and Israel. Even after the U.S.
offered a $10 million reward for evidence linking Saeed to the Mumbai
attacks, he continued to move freely in public, burnishing his legend as
a Pakistani version of Robin Hood.

By the time Raymond Davis moved into a safe house with a handful of
other C.I.A. officers and contractors in late 2010, the bulk of the
agency’s officers in Lahore were focused on investigating the growth of
Lashkar. To get more of its spies into Pakistan, the C.I.A. had
exploited the arcane rules in place for approving visas for Americans.
The State Department, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon all had separate
channels to request visas for their personnel, and all of them led to
the desk of Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s pro-American ambassador in
Washington. Haqqani had orders from Islamabad to be lenient in approving
the visas, because many of the Americans coming to Pakistan were — at
least officially — going to be administering millions of dollars in
foreign-aid money. By the time of the Lahore killings, in early 2011, so
many Americans were operating inside Pakistan under both legitimate and
false identities that even the U.S. Embassy didn’t have accurate
records of their identities and whereabouts.

The American Embassy in Islamabad is essentially a
fortress within a fortress, a pile of buildings enclosed by walls topped
with razor wire and surveillance cameras and then encircled by an outer
ring of walls that separates a leafy area, called the Diplomatic
Enclave, from the rest of the city. Inside the embassy, the work of
diplomats and spies is kept largely separate, with the C.I.A. station
occupying a warren of offices in its own wing, accessed only through
doors with coded locks.

After Davis was picked up by the Lahore police, the embassy became a
house divided by more than mere geography. Just days before the
shootings, the C.I.A. sent a new station chief to Islamabad. Old-school
and stubborn, the new chief did not come to Pakistan to be friendly with
the I.S.I. Instead, he wanted to recruit more Pakistani agents to work
for the C.I.A. under the I.S.I.’s nose, expand electronic surveillance
of I.S.I. offices and share little information with Pakistani
intelligence officers.

That hard-nosed attitude inevitably put him at odds with the American
ambassador in Islamabad, Cameron Munter. A bookish career diplomat with a
Ph.D. in history, Munter had ascended the ranks of the State
Department’s bureaucracy and accepted several postings in Iraq before
ultimately taking over the American mission in Islamabad, in late 2010.
The job was considered one of the State Department’s most important and
difficult assignments, and Munter had the burden of following Anne W.
Patterson, an aggressive diplomat who, in the three years before Munter
arrived, cultivated close ties to officials in the Bush and Obama
administrations and won praise from the C.I.A. for her unflinching
support for drone strikes in the tribal areas.

Munter saw some value to the drone program but was skeptical about the
long-term benefits. Arriving in Islamabad at a time when relations
between the United States and Pakistan were quickly deteriorating,
Munter wondered whether the pace of the drone war might be undercutting
relations with an important ally for the quick fix of killing midlevel
terrorists. He would learn soon enough that his views about the drone
program ultimately mattered little. In the Obama administration, when it
came to questions about war and peace in Pakistan, it was what the
C.I.A. believed that really counted.

With Davis sitting in prison, Munter argued that it was essential to go
immediately to the head of the I.S.I. at the time, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja
Pasha, to cut a deal. The U.S. would admit that Davis was working for
the C.I.A., and Davis would quietly be spirited out of the country,
never to return again. But the C.I.A. objected. Davis had been spying on
a militant group with extensive ties to the I.S.I., and the C.I.A.
didn’t want to own up to it. Top C.I.A. officials worried that appealing
for mercy from the I.S.I. might doom Davis. He could be killed in
prison before the Obama administration could pressure Islamabad to
release him on the grounds that he was a foreign diplomat with immunity
from local laws — even those prohibiting murder. On the day of Davis’s
arrest, the C.I.A. station chief told Munter that a decision had been
made to stonewall the Pakistanis. Don’t cut a deal, he warned, adding,
Pakistan is the enemy.

The strategy meant that American officials, from top to bottom, had to
dissemble both in public and in private about what exactly Davis had
been doing in the country. On Feb. 15, more than two weeks after the
shootings, President Obama offered his first comments about the Davis
affair. The matter was simple, Obama said in a news conference: Davis,
“our diplomat in Pakistan,” should be immediately released under the
“very simple principle” of diplomatic immunity. “If our diplomats are in
another country,” said the president, “then they are not subject to
that country’s local prosecution.”

Calling Davis a “diplomat” was, technically, accurate. He had been
admitted into Pakistan on a diplomatic passport. But there was a dispute
about whether his work in the Lahore Consulate, as opposed to the
American Embassy in Islamabad, gave him full diplomatic immunity under
the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. And after the shootings
in Lahore, the Pakistanis were not exactly receptive to debating the
finer points of international law. As they saw it, Davis was an American
spy who had not been declared to the I.S.I. and whom C.I.A. officials
still would not admit they controlled. General Pasha, the I.S.I. chief,
spoke privately by phone and in person with Leon Panetta, then the
director of the C.I.A., to get more information about the matter. He
suspected that Davis was a C.I.A. employee and suggested to Panetta that
the two spy agencies handle the matter quietly. Meeting with Panetta,
he posed a direct question.

Was Davis working for the C.I.A.? Pasha asked. No, he’s not one of ours,
Panetta replied. Panetta went on to say that the matter was out of his
hands, and that the issue was being handled inside State Department
channels. Pasha was furious, and he decided to leave Davis’s fate in the
hands of the judges in Lahore. The United States had just lost its
chance, he told others, to quickly end the dispute.

That the C.I.A. director would be overseeing a large clandestine network
of American spies in Pakistan and then lie to the I.S.I. director about
the extent of America’s secret war in the country showed just how much
the relationship had unraveled since the days in 2002, when the I.S.I.
teamed with the C.I.A. in Peshawar to hunt for Osama bin Laden in
western Pakistan. Where had it gone so wrong?

While the spy agencies had had a fraught relationship
since the beginning of the Afghan war, the first major breach came in
July 2008, when C.I.A. officers in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ashfaq
Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, to tell him that President
Bush had signed off on a set of secret orders authorizing a new strategy
in the drone wars. No longer would the C.I.A. give Pakistan advance
warning before launching missiles from Predator or Reaper drones in the
tribal areas. From that point on, the C.I.A. officers told Kayani, the
C.I.A.’s killing campaign in Pakistan would be a unilateral war.

The decision had been made in Washington after months of wrenching
debate about the growth of militancy in Pakistan’s tribal areas; a
highly classified C.I.A. internal memo, dated May 1, 2007, concluded
that Al Qaeda was at its most dangerous since 2001 because of the base
of operations that militants had established in the tribal areas. That
assessment became the cornerstone of a yearlong discussion about the
Pakistan problem. Some experts in the State Department warned that
expanding the C.I.A. war in Pakistan would further stoke anti-American
anger on the streets and could push the country into chaos. But
officials inside the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center argued for
escalating the drone campaign without the I.S.I.’s blessing. Since the
first C.I.A. drone strike in Pakistan in 2004, only a small number of
militants on the C.I.A.’s list of “high-value targets” had been killed
by drone strikes, and other potential strikes were scuttled at the last
minute because of delays in getting Pakistani approval, or because the
targets seemed to have been tipped off and had fled.

So, in July 2008, when the C.I.A.’s director, Michael Hayden, and his
deputy, Stephen Kappes, came to the White House to present the agency’s
plan to wage a unilateral war in the mountains of Pakistan, it wasn’t a
hard sell to a frustrated president. That began the relentless,
years-long drone assault on the tribal areas that President Obama
continued when he took office. And as the C.I.A.’s relationship with the
I.S.I. soured, Langley sent station chiefs out to Islamabad who spent
far less time and energy building up good will with Pakistani spies than
their predecessors had. From 2008 on, the agency cycled a succession of
seasoned case officers through Islamabad, and each left Pakistan more
embittered than the last. One of them had to leave the country in haste
when his identity was revealed in the Pakistani press. The C.I.A.
suspected the leak came from the I.S.I.

Even many of the operations that at first seemed likely to signal a new
era of cooperation between the C.I.A. and the I.S.I. ended in
recriminations and finger-pointing. In January 2010, a clandestine team
of C.I.A. officers and American special-operations troops working in
Karachi traced a cellphone to a house in Baldia Town, a slum in the
western part of the sprawling city. The C.I.A. did not conduct
unilateral operations inside large Pakistani cities, so the Americans
notified the I.S.I. about the intelligence. Pakistani troops and
policemen launched a surprise raid on the house.

Although the C.I.A. didn’t know in advance, hiding inside the house was
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a man considered to be the Afghan Taliban’s
military commander and the second in command to Mullah Muhammad Omar,
the leader of the Taliban. Only after suspects in the house were
arrested and questioned did the C.I.A. learn that Baradar was among the
detainees. The I.S.I. took him to a detention facility in an industrial
section of Islamabad and refused the C.I.A. access to him. “At that
point, things got really complicated,” one former C.I.A. officer said.

Was the entire episode a setup? Rumors had circulated inside Pakistan
that Baradar wanted to cut a deal with the Americans and bring the
Taliban to the negotiating table in Afghanistan. Had the I.S.I. somehow
engineered the entire arrest, feeding intelligence to the C.I.A. so that
Baradar could be taken off the street and the nascent peace talks
spoiled? Had the I.S.I. played the C.I.A.? Months later, senior C.I.A.
officials at Langley still couldn’t answer those questions. Today, more
than three years later, Mullah Baradar remains in Pakistani custody.

AsDavis languished in the jail cell
in Lahore, the C.I.A. was pursuing its most promising lead about the
whereabouts of Osama bin Laden since 2001, when he escaped from Tora
Bora, in Afghanistan, and fled across the border into Pakistan. A small
group of officers inside the agency’s Counterterrorism Center had become
convinced that Bin Laden was hiding in a large compound in Abbottabad, a
quiet hamlet north of Islamabad. For months, Panetta had been pushing
clandestine officers to find a shred of hard proof that Bin Laden was
hiding in the compound. The intelligence-gathering operating in
Abbottabad had become the highest priority for the C.I.A. in Pakistan.

It was therefore more than a bit inconvenient that one of its undercover
officers was sitting in a jail in Lahore facing a double murder charge.
Pakistan’s Islamist parties organized street protests and threatened
violent riots if Raymond Davis was not tried and hanged for his crimes.
American diplomats in Lahore regularly visited Davis, but the Obama
administration continued to stonewall Pakistan’s government about the
nature of Davis’s work in the country.

And then the episode claimed another victim. On Feb. 6, the grieving
widow of one of Davis’s victims swallowed a lethal amount of rat poison
and was rushed to the hospital in Faisalabad, where doctors pumped her
stomach. The woman, Shumaila Faheem, was certain that the United States
and Pakistan would quietly broker a deal to release her husband’s killer
from prison, a view she expressed to her doctors from her hospital bed.
“They are already treating my husband’s murderer like a V.I.P. in
police custody, and I am sure they will let him go because of
international pressure,” she said. She died shortly afterward and
instantly became a martyr for anti-American groups inside Pakistan.

The furor over the Davis incident was quickly escalating, threatening to
shut down most C.I.A. operations in the country and derail the
intelligence-gathering operation in Abbottabad. But the C.I.A. stood
firm and sent top officials to Islamabad, who told Ambassador Munter to
stick to the strategy.

By then, though, Munter had decided that the C.I.A.’s strategy wasn’t
working, and eventually even high-level officials in the agency began to
realize that stonewalling the Pakistanis was only causing the I.S.I. to
dig in. After discussions among White House, State Department and
C.I.A. officials in Washington, Munter approached General Pasha, the
I.S.I. chief, and came clean. Davis was with the C.I.A., he said, and
the United States needed to get him out of the country as quickly as
possible. Pasha was fuming that Leon Panetta had lied to him, and he was
going to make the Americans squirm by letting Davis sit in jail while
he considered — on his own timetable — the best way to resolve the
situation.

Back in Washington, Ambassador Haqqani was summoned to C.I.A.
headquarters on Feb. 21 and taken into Panetta’s spacious office
overlooking the agency’s campus in Langley, Va. Sitting around a large
conference table, Panetta asked Haqqani for his help securing Davis’s
release.

“If you’re going to send a Jason Bourne character to Pakistan, he should
have the skills of a Jason Bourne to get away,” Haqqani shot back,
according to one person who attended the meeting.

More than a week later, General Pasha came back to Ambassador Munter to
discuss a new strategy. It was a solution based on an ancient tradition
that would allow the matter to be settled outside the unpredictable
court system. The issue had already been discussed among a number of
Pakistani and American officials, including Ambassador Haqqani in
Washington. The reckoning for Davis’s actions would come in the form of
“blood money,” or diyat, a custom under Shariah law
that compensates the families of victims for their dead relatives. The
matter would be handled quietly, and Davis would be released from jail.

Pasha ordered I.S.I. operatives in Lahore to meet the families of the
three men killed during the January episode and negotiate a settlement.
Some of the relatives initially resisted, but the I.S.I. negotiators
were not about to let the talks collapse. After weeks of discussions,
the parties agreed on a total of 200 million Pakistani rupees,
approximately $2.34 million, to offer “forgiveness” to the jailed C.I.A.
officer.

Only a small group of Obama administration officials knew of the talks,
and as they dragged on, Lahore’s high court was preparing to rule on
whether Davis would be granted diplomatic immunity, a decision the
C.I.A. expected to go against the United States and worried might set a
precedent for future cases in Pakistan.

Davis remained in the dark about all of this. When he arrived for his
court appearance on March 16, he was fully expecting to hear that the
trial would proceed and that the judge would issue a new court date. He
was escorted into the courtroom, his wrists cuffed in front of him, and
locked inside an iron cage near the judge’s bench. According to one
person’s account, General Pasha sat in the back of the courtroom, his
cellphone out. He began sending out a stream of nervous text messages to
Ambassador Munter, updating him about the court proceedings. Pasha was
one of the most powerful men in Pakistan, and yet the I.S.I. had little
control over the mercurial courts in Lahore, and he wasn’t entirely sure
that things would proceed according to plan.

The first part of the hearing went as everyone expected. The judge,
saying that the case would go ahead, noted that his ruling on diplomatic
immunity would come in a matter of days. Pakistani reporters
frantically began filing their stories about how this seemed a blow to
the American case, and that it appeared that Davis would not be released
from jail anytime soon. But then the judge ordered the courtroom
cleared, and General Pasha’s secret plan unfolded.

Through a side entrance, 18 relatives of the victims walked into the
room, and the judge announced that the civil court had switched to a
Shariah court. Each of the family members approached Davis, some of them
with tears in their eyes or sobbing outright, and announced that he or
she forgave him. Pasha sent another text message to Munter: The matter
was settled. Davis was a free man. In a Lahore courtroom, the laws of
God had trumped the laws of man.

The drama played out entirely in Urdu, and throughout the proceeding, a
baffled Davis sat silently inside the cage. He was even more stunned
when I.S.I. operatives whisked him out of the courthouse through a back
entrance and pushed him into a waiting car that sped to the Lahore
airport.

The move had been choreographed to get Davis out of the country as
quickly as possible. American officials, including Munter, were waiting
for Davis at the airport, and some began to worry. Davis had, after all,
already shot dead two men he believed were threatening him. If he
thought he was being taken away to be killed, he might try to make an
escape, even try to kill the I.S.I. operatives inside the car. When the
car arrived at the airport and pulled up to the plane ready to take
Davis out of Pakistan, the C.I.A. operative was in a daze. It appeared
to the Americans waiting for him that Davis realized only then that he
was safe.

The Davis affair led Langley to order dozens of covert
officers out of Pakistan in the hope of lowering the temperature in the
C.I.A. – I.S.I. relationship. Ambassador Munter issued a public
statement shortly after the bizarre court proceeding, saying he was
“grateful for the generosity” of the families and expressing regret for
the entire incident and the “suffering it caused.”

But the secret deal only fueled the anger in Pakistan, and anti-American
protests flared in major cities, including Islamabad, Karachi and
Lahore. Demonstrators set tires ablaze, clashed with Pakistani riot
police and brandished placards with slogans like “I Am Raymond Davis,
Give Me a Break, I Am Just a C.I.A. Hit Man.”

The entire episode — and bin Laden’s killing in Abbottabad later that
spring — extinguished any lingering productive relations between the
United States and Pakistan. Leon Panetta’s relationship with General
Pasha, the I.S.I. chief, was poisoned, and the already small number of
Obama officials pushing for better relations between Washington and
Islamabad dwindled even further. Munter was reporting daily back to
Washington about the negative impact of the armed-drone campaign and
about how the C.I.A. seemed to be conducting a war in a vacuum,
oblivious to the ramifications that the drone strikes were having on
American relations with Pakistan’s government.

The C.I.A. had approval from the White House to carry out missile
strikes in Pakistan even when the agency’s targeters weren’t certain
about exactly whom they were killing. Under the rules of so-called
“signature strikes,” decisions about whether to fire missiles from
drones could be made based on patterns of activity deemed suspicious.
For instance, if a group of young “military-age males” were observed
moving in and out of a suspected militant training camp and were thought
to be carrying weapons, they could be considered legitimate targets.
American officials admit it is nearly impossible to judge a person’s age
from thousands of feet in the air, and in Pakistan’s tribal areas,
adolescent boys are often among militant fighters. Using such broad
definitions to determine who was a “combatant” and therefore a
legitimate target allowed Obama administration officials at one point to
claim that the escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan had not killed
any civilians for a year. It was something of a trick of logic: in an
area of known militant activity, all military-age males could be
considered enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone
strike there was categorized as a combatant.

The perils of this approach were laid bare on March 17, 2011, the day
after Davis was released from prison and spirited out of the country.
C.I.A. drones attacked a tribal council meeting in the village of Datta
Khel, in North Waziristan, killing dozens of men. Ambassador Munter and
some at the Pentagon thought the timing of the strike was disastrous,
and some American officials suspected that the massive strike was the
C.I.A. venting its anger about the Davis episode. More important,
however, many American officials believed that the strike was botched,
and that dozens of people died who shouldn’t have.

Other American officials came to the C.I.A.’s defense, saying that the
tribal gathering was in fact a meeting of senior militants and therefore
a legitimate target. But the drone strike unleashed a furious response
in Pakistan, and street protests in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar forced
the temporary closure of American consulates in those cities.

Munter said he believed that the C.I.A. was being reckless and that his
position as ambassador was becoming untenable. His relationship with the
C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad, already strained because of their
disagreements over the handling of the Davis case, deteriorated even
further when Munter demanded that the C.I.A. give him the chance to call
off specific missile strikes. During one screaming match between the
two men, Munter tried to make sure the station chief knew who was in
charge, only to be reminded of who really held the power in Pakistan.

“You’re not the ambassador!” Munter shouted. “You’re right, and I don’t want to be the ambassador,” the station chief replied.

This turf battle spread to Washington, and a month after Bin Laden was
killed, President Obama’s top advisers were arguing in a National
Security Council meeting over who really was in charge in Pakistan. At
the June 2011 meeting, Munter, who participated via secure video link,
began making his case that he should have veto power over specific drone
strikes.

Panetta cut Munter off, telling him that the C.I.A. had the authority to
do what it wanted in Pakistan. It didn’t need to get the ambassador’s
approval for anything. “I don’t work for you,” Panetta told Munter, according to several people at the meeting. But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to Munter’s defense. She
turned to Panetta and told him that he was wrong to assume he could
steamroll the ambassador and launch strikes against his approval.

“No, Hillary,” Panetta said, “it’s you who are flat wrong.”

There was a stunned silence, and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon
tried to regain control of the meeting. In the weeks that followed,
Donilon brokered a compromise of sorts: Munter would be allowed to
object to specific drone strikes, but the C.I.A. could still press its
case to the White House and get approval for strikes even over the
ambassador’s objections. Obama’s C.I.A. had, in essence, won yet again.

As for Raymond Davis, he tried to settle back into his
life in the United States after being flown out of Pakistan. He found
work as a firearms instructor, but in the end he couldn’t stay out of
trouble. On Oct. 1, 2011, just seven months after his abrupt departure
from Pakistan, Davis was eyeing a parking spot in front of a bagel shop
in Highlands Ranch, Colo., a suburb of Denver. So was Jeffrey Maes, a
50-year-old minister who was driving with his wife and two young
daughters. When Maes beat Davis to the spot, Davis shouted profanities
through his open window. Then he jumped out of his car and confronted
Maes, telling the minister that he had been waiting for the parking
spot.

According to an affidavit given by Maes, he told Davis to “relax and quit being stupid.” Davis struck Maes in the face, knocking him to the pavement. Maes said
in court that when he stood up from the fall, Davis continued to hit
him. The minister’s wife, later recalling the episode, said she had
never in her life seen a man so full of rage. Just last month, after
protracted legal proceedings, Davis pleaded guilty to a charge of
third-degree misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to two years of
probation. A judge ordered him to pay restitution and attend
anger-management classes.

On the streets and in the markets of Pakistan, Raymond Davis remains the
boogeyman, an American killer lurking in the subconscious of a deeply
insecure nation. On a steamy summer night last summer, Hafiz Muhammad
Saeed — the head of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the reason Davis and his team
were sent to Lahore in the first place — stood on the back of a flatbed
truck and spoke to thousands of cheering supporters less than a mile
from Pakistan’s Parliament building in Islamabad. A $10 million American
bounty still hung over Saeed’s head, part of a broader squeeze on
Lashkar-e-Taiba’s finances. But there he was, out in the open and
whipping the crowd into a fury with a pledge to “rid Pakistan of
American slavery.” The rally was the culmination of a march from Lahore
to Islamabad that Saeed ordered to protest American involvement in the
country. The night before the march reached the capital, six Pakistani
troops were killed by gunmen riding motorcycles not far from where the
marchers were spending the night, leading to speculation that Saeed had
ordered the attack.

But Saeed insisted that night that he was not to blame for the deaths.
The killers were foreigners, he told the crowd, a group of assassins
with a secret agenda to destabilize Pakistan and steal its nuclear
arsenal. With a dramatic flourish, he said he knew exactly who had
killed the men. “It was the Americans!” he shouted to loud approvals. “It was
Blackwater!” The cheers grew even louder. He saved the biggest applause
line for last: “It was another Raymond Davis!” This article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., a
Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” published by the
Penguin Press.

Mark Mazzetti is a national-security correspondent for The Times. He shared a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Americans rise in rank within Somalia jihadi militant group linked to al-Qaida

The October al-Qaida video shows a light-skinned man handing out food
to families displaced by famine in Somalia. But the masked man is not
Somali, or even African — he’s a Wisconsin native who grew up in San
Diego. A handful of young Muslims from the U.S. are taking high-visibility
propaganda and operational roles inside an al-Qaida-linked insurgent
force in Somalia known as al-Shabab. While most are from Minnesota,
which has the largest Somali population in the nation, al-Shabab members
include a Californian and an Alabaman with no ancestral ties to
Somalia.

“They are being deployed in roles that appear to be
shrewdly calculated to raise al-Shabab’s international profile and to
recruit others, especially those from the United States and other
English-speaking countries,” said Anders Folk, a former assistant U.S.
attorney who prosecuted suspected al-Shabab supporters in Minnesota.

Officials
fear another terrorist attack in East Africa. Kenya announced on Jan. 7
that it had thwarted attempted al-Shabab attacks over the holidays. The
same day, Britain’s Foreign Office urged Britons in Kenya to be extra
vigilant, warning that terrorists there may be “in the final stages of
planning attacks.”

More than 40 people have traveled from the U.S.
to Somalia to join al-Shabab since 2007, and 15 of them have died,
according to a report from the House Homeland Security Committee.
Federal investigations into al-Shabab recruitment in the U.S. have
centered on Minnesota, which has more than 32,000 Somalis.

At
least 21 men have left Minnesota to join al-Shabab in that same time.
The FBI has confirmed that at least two of them died in Somalia as
suicide bombers. A U.S. citizen is suspected in a third suicide bombing,
and another is under investigation in connection with a fourth bombing
on Oct. 29 that killed 15 people.

The star of the al-Qaida video
was Jehad Mostafa, 30, a Californian who handed out food using the name
Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir, according to the SITE Monitoring Service. The
Washington Post reported last year that Mostafa served as top lieutenant
to Saleh Nabhan, a senior al-Qaida operative killed by Navy SEALs in a
helicopter attack inside Somalia in 2010. Mostafa and the
Alabaman, Omar Hammami, 27, are among about a dozen men who have been
charged in federal court in the U.S. and are believed to be in Somalia.

The
Americans appear to have been motivated by the Ethiopian army’s
intervention in Somalia in 2006, which they saw as an invasion. However,
many experts believe it’s only a matter of time before al-Shabab turns
its wrath on the U.S., which in February 2008 designated it as a
terrorist organization. The group killed 76 people in terrorist bombings
in Uganda in 2010 during the World Cup final.

U.S. military
commanders fear that Americans inside al-Shabab could train as
bombmakers and use their U.S. passports to carry out attacks in the
United States. E.K. Wilson, the agent overseeing the FBI’s
investigation in Minneapolis, said he cannot comment on whether there is
an outstanding order to capture or kill Americans fighting for
al-Shabab. The FBI has publicly said the Americans should return to the
U.S.

It’s a mystery what caused Mostafa, a young man whom many remember as mild and friendly, to join an extremist group. Mostafa
grew up in San Diego and graduated from the University of California
San Diego. Imam Abdeljalil Mezgouri of the Islamic Center of San Diego,
the city’s largest mosque, said Mostafa was a respectful teen and good
student.

“He was a very quiet, very loving boy. He
didn’t talk too much but when he did talk, people liked him,” said
Mezgouri. Mezgouri said Mostafa got married in his early 20s to a woman
he believed was from Somalia.

Public
records show Mostafa was the president of the now-defunct Muslim Youth
Council of San Diego, or MYCSD. The former organization’s Web site says
the group was “dedicated to showing the world that Islam is a religion
of peace and Muslims are a peaceful and productive part of society.”

Mostafa’s
father, Halim Mostafa, a Kurdish Syrian, is a prominent figure in San
Diego’s Muslim community who has tried to build bridges with
non-Muslims. He made a low-budget film released in 2008 called “Mozlym”
to show how the true meaning of Islam is often lost amid the
misconceptions of non-Muslims in America, according to the film’s Web
site.

Mostafa’s father declined to talk.

“I just don’t want to get involved. I’m really sorry I cannot say anything. God bless you,” he said. Edgar
Hopida, a spokesman for the San Diego chapter of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, said Halim Mostafa believes in the most
liberal interpretation of Islam and noted that “it’s ironic if his son
is involved with al-Shabab.”

Mostafa is believed to have met
American militant Anwar al-Awlaki about a decade ago at a San Diego
mosque, according to The Washington Post. He went to Somalia in 2005.
Federal officials declined to comment. Mostafa was indicted in
August 2010 on terrorism charges for allegedly providing material
support to al-Shabab. Mostafa has a leadership role inside al-Shabab and
serves as a key liaison to al-Qaida, said Evan Kohlmann, who has
assisted government investigations into al-Shabab recruiting and
financing.

AP could not reach Mostafa or Hammami for comment. A
spokesman for al-Shabab said that the questions AP emailed were “of a
personal nature relating to the roles and activities of certain
individuals and for that reason they were left unanswered.”

The
spokesman also said al-Shabab and al-Qaida were “brothers in Islam.” He
did not provide a name but emailed from an address used by al-Shabab’s
media outreach wing, which also recently launched a Twitter feed. The
Alabaman, Hammami, 27, has taken on the role of jihadi lecturer and
Islamic scholar. After U.S. Navy SEALs killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin
Laden in Pakistan earlier this year, Hammami threatened to avenge the
killing at a news conference near Mogadishu.

Al-Awlaki’s death by a
U.S. drone in Yemen in September left Hammami as the most influential
U.S. English speaker in the jihadi propaganda sphere, said terrorism
expert Ben Venzke. Hammami is also known as Abu Mansour al-Amriki or
“the American.”

“His more accessible image and manner of speaking
may prove a growing and significant threat to not just the region
around Somalia but for future attacks on U.S. soil,” said Venzke of the
Washington-based IntelCenter.

Hammami grew up in Daphne, Ala., a
bedroom community of 20,000 outside Mobile known for sunsets on the Gulf
of Mexico, seafood and high school football. The phone directory lists
43 Christian churches and not a single Islamic congregation in Daphne. The
son of a Christian mother and a Syrian-born Muslim father, Hammami
attended Daphne High School. Then-assistant principal Don Blanchard
recalls Hammami as generally well liked.

“Omar I would
not classify as a troubled kid,” said Blanchard. Hammami
enrolled at the University of South Alabama, where he was president of
the Muslim Student Association. Following the 2001 terror attacks,
Hammami spoke to the student newspaper. “Even now it’s difficult to
believe a Muslim could have done this,” The Vanguard quoted Hammami as
saying.

Hammami
went to Somalia in 2006. He was indicted in 2007 on terrorism charges,
and faced more charges in 2009 for providing material support to
terrorists. Hammami, who wears a long beard and often raps in
al-Shabab videos, released a nearly 50-minute lecture in October to
commemorate five years with the group. He spouts hatred for “Western
oppression.” In the video, provided to AP by the IntelCenter, he
compares his upbringing in America with his life in Somalia, where he
says a microwave — “or even a normal oven” — is a rarity.

The
English speaker serves as a recruiter and fundraiser and is one of the
top people in charge of al-Shabab’s foreign fighters, Kohlmann said. Hammami
attends morning fighting drills and motivates new recruits, former
al-Shabab fighter Abdi Hassan told AP. Hammami avoids mobile phones for
fear intelligence agencies will trace him, and uses pseudonyms on the
Internet.

“He sometimes cries with emotion, which makes others
cry with him,” said Hassan. He added, “Every new American is asked to
convince his friends to come. The Americans’ suicide attacks and
speeches are meant to attract other Americans.”

The Americans
helped produce what Venzke calls one of the most sophisticated
recruitment videos ever released, featuring Minneapolis men in a July
2008 ambush of Ethiopian troops along a road in Somalia. Another video
features a Minneapolis man who appeals to others to join the cause in
English.

Al-Shabab does not just recruit from the U.S. Three
suspects accused of having ties to al-Shabab are now in prison in
Australia and awaiting sentencing for allegedly planning an attack on an
Australian military base. Dozens of U.K. residents have also
traveled to Somalia to join al-Shabab, and the British government is
concerned that Somalia shows many of the characteristics that made
Afghanistan “a seedbed for terrorism.”

Rick Nelson, a senior
fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in even the
possibility of military reprisal might not deter al-Shabab from
carrying out an attack inside the United States. “All the elements are there for it to happen,” Nelson said.

An American
jihadist who set up the terrorist training camp where the
leader of the 2005 London suicide bombers learned how to manufacture
explosives, has been quietly released after serving only four and a half
years of a possible 70-year sentence, a Guardian investigation has
learned. The unreported sentencing of Mohammed Junaid Babar
to "time served" because of what a New York judge described as
"exceptional co-operation" that began even before his arrest has raised
questions over whether Babar was a US informer at the time he was
helping to train the ringleader of the 7 July tube and bus bombings. Lawyers
representing the families of victims and survivors of the attacks have
compared the lenient treatment of Babar to the controversial release of
the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Babar was imprisoned
in 2004 – although final sentencing was deferred – after pleading guilty
in a New York court to five counts of terrorism. He set up the training
camp in Pakistan where Mohammad Sidique Khan and several other British
terrorists learned about bomb-making and how to use combat weapons. Babar
admitted to being a dangerous terrorist who consorted with some of the
highest-ranking members of al-Qaida, providing senior members with money
and equipment, running weapons, and planning two attempts to
assassinate the former president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf.

But
in a deal with prosecutors for the US attorney's office, Babar agreed
to plead guilty and become a government supergrass in return for a
drastically reduced sentence. The Guardian has obtained a court
document which shows that on 10 December last year – six years after his
initial arrest and subsequent guilty plea – he was sentenced to "time
served" and charged $500 (£310) by the court in a "special assessment"
fee. The document also reveals that Babar had by then spent just over
four years in some form of prison and more than two years free on bail.

Graham
Foulkes, a magistrate whose 22-year-old son David was killed by Khan at
Edgware Road underground station in 2005, said: "People get four and a
half years for burglary. They can get more for some road traffic
offences. So for an international terrorist who's directly linked to the
death of my son and dozens and dozens of people to get that sentence is
just outrageous." Fifty-two people were killed and 784 injured on
7 July 2005 when four suicide bombers detonated rucksacks filled with
explosives and nails on London's transport system in the morning rush
hour.

The lawyer representing the families of the dead and
survivors, Clifford Tibber of the law firm Anthony Gold, said they would
be devastated to learn that Babar had served only a small proportion of
his possible sentence. "Babar admitted setting up and funding
training camps attended by the 7/7 bombers," Tibber said. "When the
British government released Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber who received a
life sentence, on compassionate grounds after eight years the Americans
were furious. Imagine how the bereaved and the survivors will feel
about [Babar's] paltry sentence."

A remark from the sentencing
judge that Babar "began co-operating even before his arrest", has raised
the possibility, supported by other circumstantial evidence obtained by
the Guardian, that he may have been an informant for the US government
before his detention by the FBI in April 2004. Babar facilitated
the London bombers' knowledge of bomb-making when he invited around a
dozen British jihadists to attend a camp that he had helped set up in
north-west Pakistan in the summer of 2003. In a debriefing with US
law enforcement agents in 2004, Babar told US prosecutors about Khan,
whom he knew as "Ibrahim". British terrorism investigators showed Babar
an unclear surveillance photo of Khan in August 2004, but Babar failed
to identify him.

He has said that when he saw pictures of Khan in
newspapers after the bombings he alerted the US authorities straight
away: "I told them [the American authorities] that was the person that
was Ibrahim. I had mentioned Ibrahim before July 2005." After his
guilty plea in 2004, Babar spent a good proportion of his four and a
half years outside the regular prison system. He flew to testify in
trials in the UK and in Canada and met law enforcement officers from
around the world.

In 2008 he was granted bail awaiting
final
sentencing, after being warned by a judge that his conviction on five
terrorism offences carried a maximum 70-year term. Although a
probation report dated 9 July 2010 recommended that Babar remain in jail
for another 30 years, the US attorney's office submitted their own
report to the New York court, known as a 5K1, which praised Babar's
work. One extract read out in court stated: "Over the last six and a
half years the level of assistance provided by Babar to both the United States government and foreign governments has been more than substantial. It has been extraordinary."

Speaking
in court about Babar's role in helping to jail British, Canadian and
American terrorists, the assistant US attorney Brendan McGuire described
Babar's co-operation as exceptional, and he recommended that he be
given a significantly reduced sentence. Babar's defence lawyer,
Daniel Ollen, told the court that during the two years his client had
been out on bail, he had "paid his debt to society" and had settled into
a new life with his wife and daughter. Ollen said the
government's positive statements on behalf of Babar in court spoke
volumes about his "hugely successful" actions, and that in 30 years he
had never seen a more positive 5K1 report from the government.

Speaking
for the first time about the case, Ollen told the Guardian that in
court "the government went to bat for him. They used words like
'extraordinary' and 'unprecedented'. Babar's co-operation really was
spectacular when you get down to it." When sentencing Babar, the
judge, Victor Marrero, praised his work, describing the sentence of four
years and eight months as "reasonable and appropriate". "The
court takes note that the government has evaluated Mr Babar's
cooperation to be significant, truthful, complete, and liable.," Marrero
said.

"[He] worked with the FBI and foreign governments to assist
in investigations of terrorism organisations, including al-Qaida, and
of terrorist activities such as the London bomb plot." "Taking
into account the nature and circumstances of the offence and the history
and characteristics of the defendant ... the court finds that a
sentence of time served is reasonable and appropriate and that such a
term is sufficient but not greater than necessary to promote the proper
objectives of sentencing," Marrero said.

A law enforcement agent who arrested Babar and spent more than 500 hours debriefing him said he believed Babar was selfish. The
officer, who wished to be known as agent A, said: "Babar wasn't a hero.
He didn't look at the American flag and suddenly become all patriotic.
When his back was against the wall he did what was right for him ... he
was selfish." Further inquiries uncovered allegations from a top
US terrorism lawyer who has reviewed sealed evidence in the case which
suggests Babar could have been working for the US authorities before his
arrest in April 2004.

Having reviewed the court transcript
himself, bereaved father Graham Foulkes said: "There's a hint from one
or two of the sentences [in the transcript] that do strongly suggest
[Babar's] co-operation was going well beyond his official arrest. And it
looks as if the Americans may well have known in detail what Babar was
up to in Pakistan [at the time] and that is a very, very serious
matter." When judge Marrero's office was asked to clarify the
remarks, his office declined to comment. The US attorney's office
declined to comment on whether Babar had been working with US agencies
before his arrest.

The law enforcement officer involved in Babar's arrest and debriefing also refused to discuss the allegations. Freed
from prison and no longer in the witness protection scheme, it is not
known where Babar is currently living. Visiting Babar's childhood home
in the Jamaica area of Queens, New York, the Guardian was told that
Babar's mother was on holiday in Pakistan. The woman who answered the
door and identified herself as Babar's cousin did not know where Babar
was living and refused to comment further.

Bosnian
Muslim Army troops of the Al-Qaeda linked El Mujahedeen Unit parade
in downtown Zenica in central Bosnia in 1995, carrying the black flag
of Islamic jihad. Ossama Bin Laden played a key role in the 1992-1995
Bosnian civil war. Alija Izetbegovic not only issued him a Bosnian
passport through the Bosnian Embassy in Vienna in 1993, but met with him
at least on one occasion in Sarajevo in November, 1994. Bin Laden
came to Bosnia at least two times. Bin Laden organized the recruitment
of Arab-Afghan mujadeheen “volunteers” for Bosnia. He also used
Islamic front organizations and charities to funnel money to the
Bosnian Muslim regime and army.

More
importantly, according to many prominent anti-terror experts, Bosnia
was the “guidebook” for Al-Qaeda. Bosnia was where Al-Qaeda was forged
in the fires of Islamic jihad. In Against All Enemies: Inside
America’s War on Terror (NY: Free Press, 2004), Richard A. Clarke, who
was the anti-terror czar in the George W. Bush Administration, a
security and counter-terrorism advisor to three U.S. Presidents,
wrote:

“What we saw
unfold in Bosnia was a guidebook to the Bin Laden network, though we
didn’t recognize it as such at the time. Beginning in 1992, Arabs who
had been former Afghan mujahedeen began to arrive. With them came the
arrangers, the money men, logisticians, and ‘charities.’ They arranged
front companies and banking networks. As they had done in
Afghanistan, the Arabs created their own brigade, allegedly part of the
Bosnian army but operating on its own. The muj, as they came to be
known, were fierce fighters against the better-armed Serbs. They
engaged in ghastly torture, murder, and mutilation that seemed
excessive even by Balkan standards.”

The funding and recruitment of the mujahedeen to Bosnia was organized by Bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network: “Bosnian
President Alija Izetbegovic decided to take aid where he could…
Better yet, al Qaeda sent men, trained, tough fighters. European and
U.S. intelligence services began to trace the funding and support of
the muj to bin Laden in Sudan, and to facilities that had already been
established by the muj in Western Europe itself.”

The Afghan-Arab mujahedeen force in Bosnia was engaged in an “al Qaeda jihad”: “Although
Western intelligence agencies never labeled the muj activity in
Bosnia an al Qaeda jihad, it is now clear that is exactly what it
was.” Clarke noted that “[m]any of the names that we first
encountered in Bosnia showed up later in other roles, working for al
Qaeda.” These included:

1)
Abu al-Makki, who was seen in the December, 2001 video standing next
to bin Laden “as al Qaeda’s leader extolled the September 11 attacks”;

2) Abu al-Haili, who was arrested in Morocco in 2002 for planning to attack U.S. ships;

3) Ali al-Shamrani, who was arrested by Saudi police for attacking the U.S. military aid mission in 1995;

4) Khalil Deek, arrested in 1999 for planning attacks against U.S. installations in Jordan;

5) Fateh Kamel, part of the Millennium Plot cell in Canada;

6) Khalid Almihdhar, 9/11 hijacker fought in Bosnia; and,

7) Nawaf Alhazmi, 9/11 hijacker fought in the Bosnian civil war.

Bosnian
Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, lower right, meeting with Al-Qaeda
linked Arab-Afghan mujahedeen in Bosnia. One of the hijackers of the
second attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, possessed
a Bosnian passport. Senior Al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was
granted Bosnian citizenship in November, 1995. He is allegedly the
mastermind and planner of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the U.S.
Mohammed was born in Kuwait to a family from the Baluchi region of
Pakistan. He went to Bosnia in September, 1995. He went in the guise of
a Muslim “humanitarian aid worker” for an Islamic charity front
organization called Egyptian Relief, a front for the radical Muslim
Brotherhood of Cairo.

The Bosnian
government also issued a passport to Mahrez Amduni, a senior aide to
Ossama Bin Laden, in 1997. In an Agence France Presse news report from
September 24, 1999, “Bin Laden Was Granted Bosnian Passport”, it was
reported: “Earlier this week the Bosnian government confirmed it had
granted citizenship and passport to a Tunisian-born senior aide of
bin-Laden in 1997. The government said citizenship was given to Mahrez
Amduni, known in Sarajevo as Mehrez Amdouni.” The same report noted
that the Bosnian government destroyed all the documents and files
relating to Ossama Bin Laden: “’The Bosnian embassy in Vienna granted a
passport to bin Laden in 1993,’ Dani magazine said, quoting anonymous
sources, emphasizing that files and traces linked to his case have
recently been destroyed by the government.

“‘High
Muslim officials of the Bosnian foreign ministry agreed that it was
the top priority. It was even more important than investigating a
person responsible for granting a passport to the most wanted terrorist
in the world,’ Dani reported.”

Marko
Attila Hoare conceded that “Osama bin Lade himself … plays very much
an off-stage role” in Bosnia “although he apparently hoped to use the mujahedeen presence
in Bosnia to create a base for operations against the US and its
allies in Europe.” Ossama Bin Laden was part of “How Bosnia Armed”, by
violating the UN arms embargo against Bosnia and the former
Yugoslavia. Renate Flottau, an award-winning German journalist,
reported seeing Ossama Bin Laden meeting with Bosnian Muslim President
Alija Izetbegovic in 1994. Born in Munich, she began her career
working for newspapers and magazines in Germany. She worked in
television as well in 1976.

In the
1980s she settled in Belgrade with her husband Heiko Flottau. She
worked initially for the German television network Zweites Deutsches
Fernsehen (ZDF, Second German Television) and then became the Balkan
correspondent for Der Spiegel in 1986. Flottau was one of the few
Western journalists to meet Osama Bin Laden in Sarajevo when Bin Laden
met with Izetbegovic. Flottau was waiting to interview Izetbegovic in
his office when she met Ossama Bin Lade in Sarajevo in November,
1994. Bin Laden gave her his business card and informed her that he was
planning to bring Afghan-Arab mujahedeen fighters to Bosnia. He was
given VIP treatment and rushed in to meet with Izetbegovic.

Bin
Laden spoke to Flottau for ten minutes in fluent English. Moreover,
he told her that he had a Bosnian passport issued by the Izetbegovic
government. Staff for Izetbegovic told her that Bin Laden is “here
every day”. Flottau maintained that she again saw Bin Laden meeting at
Izetbegovic’s office one week later. In addition, she witnessed Bin
Laden in the company of senior members of Izetbegovic’s
ultranationalist Muslim party, the SDA, Stranka Demokratske Akcije,
Party of Democratic Action. She recognized members of the Bosnian
Muslim secret police in an meeting that she later characterized as
“incredibly bizarre”. Bosnian Muslim Sejfudin Tokic, who was the
speaker of the upper house of the Bosnian parliament, confirmed these
meetings between Ossama Bin Laden and Alija Izetbegovic. There is also
purportedly a photograph of the meeting.

Flottau’s
account was corroborated by veteran British London Times journalist
Eve-Ann Prentice on February 6, 2006 when she testified under oath at
the ICTY. Prentice stated that she witnessed Ossama Bin Laden “being
escorted” into the office of Alija Izetbegovic in November, 1994.
Ossama Bin Laden “was shown straight through to Mr. Izetbegovic’s
office.”

Bosnian Muslim Army
members of the Al-Qaeda linked El Mujahedeen Unit in downtown Zenica
wearing green headbands with Arabic script to signify Islamic jihad,
1995. Ossama Bin Laden was able to effectively finance and organize Al
Qaeda and mujahedeen recruits for the Bosnian Muslim Army. In the
Los Angeles Times article “Terrorists Use Bosnia as Base and
Sanctuary” from October 7, 2001, the report noted that there was a
connection between Al-Qaeda and Ossama Bin Laden and the El Mujahedeen
Battalion in the Bosnian Muslim Army:

“Bin Laden financed small convoys of recruits from the Arab world through his businesses in Sudan.”

Ossama
Bin Laden relied on his experiences in Bosnia in the creation,
development, and expansion of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. Bin Laden
also relied on his Bosnian experience in planning and organizing the
9/11 attacks.

Fifteen
years ago, on December 11, 1994, Russian troops entered the territory
of the Chechen Republic, which marked the beginning of the First Chechen
Campaign to root out terrorism and establish law and order in the
troubled nation. The events, which triggered the armed conflict, started
developing in the autumn of 1991, when the Chechen administration
declared sovereignty and announced its decision to pull out from the
RSFSR and the USSR. During the next three years the Chechen government
was busy with dissolving the previous power agencies, canceling the laws
of the Russian Federation and establishing the armed forces of Chechnya
with President Gen. Jokhar Dudayev at the head. The armed forces of
Chechnya were armed with Soviet-made small arms and military hardware
that were left in the republic after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As
a result of such separatist activities, Chechnya became a real threat
to Russia and became a source of international terrorism. Military
actions in the republic continued for nearly two years. Over 4,000
Russian servicemen were killed in the war, about 2,000 went missing and
nearly 20,000 were wounded, RIA Novosti
says. Russia and Chechnya signed the Khasavyurt Accord in 1996 - after
two years of military actions – the ceasefire agreement, which marked
the end of the First Chechen War. The document was signed by the head of
Russia’s Security Council Alexander Lebed and the leader of the Chechen
separatist movement Aslan Maskhadov. Lebed died in a helicopter crash
in 2002. Maskhadov, the leader of Chechen terrorists, was killed by
Russian troops in 2005.

Chechnya
became Russia’s strongest pain. Thousands of Russian families and people
of other nationalities left the republic. The Chechen administration
had a goal to build an independent Islamic state from the Black Sea to
the Caspian Sea. The second Chechen war began in the summer of 1999 with
the intrusion of Shamil Basayev’s and Khattab’s gunmen in the Republic
of Dagestan. Chechnya started living under the conditions of a
counter-terrorist operation, which continued for ten years and was
officially stopped only on April 16, 2009. All terrorist leaders were
killed during the second campaign. Many former separatists took the side
of Chechnya’s legitimate administration chaired by pro-Russian
politician Akhmad Kadyrov. Russia wired enormous funds to Chechnya to
restore the nation’s economy.

The
West could do nothing else but follow the policy of double standards and
accuse Russia of violation of human rights in Chechnya. Chechen
terrorists conducted and claimed responsibility for a series of horrific
terrorist acts in Russia throughout those years: apartment buildings
were exploded in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk in 1999; hundreds were
taken hostage at Moscow’s music theater in 2002. The Chechen gunmen
conducted the most terrible terrorist act in September of 2004, when
they killed tens of innocent children in Beslan. Chechnya ’s sitting
President Ramzan Kadyrov, who was a teenager during the First Chechen
War, believes that the war in Chechnya was masterminded by the West.
Western countries, Kadyrov thinks, instigated the war to make the USSR
and then Russia collapse.

“It is an
open secret nowadays that the Soviet Union fell apart contrary to the
will of its people. They decided in the West that they should not stop
at that. They wanted to fire up a local war which would embrace more
regions and eventually weaken or even destroy Russia as a joint nation,”
Kadyrov told journalists December 11 in Grozny. “They wanted to trigger
a local religious conflict in Chechnya and have the Muslim population
involved in it. Afterwards, they wanted to provoke mass disturbances in
the country. I am certain that there were no objective reasons to start
the war with the use of aviation, artillery and hundreds of thousands of
military men,” Interfax quoted Kadyrov as saying.

“The
West was pursuing its goal, but Russia’s then-administration
unconsciously did its bidding and let the local conflict grow into a
national tragedy. No one can say today how many billions of dollars
Russia had to spend on that war. It was the West that obtruded the war
on Russia,” Kadyrov said. It is worthy of note that the deployment of
Russian troops in Chechnya was not a disturbance of the republic’s
peaceful life. First blood was shed long before December 11, 1994.
Chechnya was involved in a series of internal fratricidal wars before
1994.

"The Clinton administration followed up by providing strong support to
the KLA, even though it was known that the KLA supported the Muslim
mujahadeen. Despite that knowledge, then Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright had the KLA removed from the State Department list of
terrorists. This action paved the way for the United States to provide
the KLA with needed logistical support. At the same time, the KLA also
received support from Iran and Usama bin Laden, along with 'Islamic holy
warriors' who were jihad veterans from Bosnia, Chechnya and
Afghanistan. Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere, in his book, 'Dollars
for Terror,' said that the international Islamic networks linked to bin
Laden received help from U.S. intelligence community. Indeed, Chechen
sources claim that U.S. intelligence also aided them in their opposition
to Russia. Given that U.S. policy in the post-Cold War period has not
only been anti-Russian but anti-Iranian, the United States worked
closely with Pakistan's predominantly Sunni Inter-Services Intelligence
organization. Through ISI, the United States recruited Sunni mujahadeen
by staging them in Chechnya to fight in Bosnia and later in Kosovo."

"As the intelligence newsletter Stratfor -- which Time magazine ranked
as the nation's top intelligence site in 2003, and which Barron's
described as 'a private quasi-CIA' -- pointed out a few months ago, with
Ukraine now firmly in the West's orbit, America, with NATO and the EU,
has managed to succeed exactly where Hitler and Napoleon failed: it has
dismantled the Russian empire, leaving the rump state exposed, weakened
and essentially at the West's mercy.... In the wake of the Beslan
massacre in September, 2004, in which hundreds of children were killed
during a Chechen separatist seizure of a school in southern Russia,
President Putin went on television and blamed certain foreign powers for
supporting the terrorists with the aim of defanging Russia for good,
breaking it apart, and seizing its valuable resources. He did not name
the United States, but it was clear whom he meant. .....Stratfor, whose
politics could be described as something between patriotic-American and
realpolitik, agreed. According to its Kremlin sources, Putin
specifically named the U.S. and Great Britain during private meetings.
And as Stratfor noted in its April report, there is plenty of evidence
to support the Kremlin's claim. In the first place, while Muslim
separatist militants from other conflict zones are shunned and even
violently pursued by the U.S., the Chechen separatist representatives
are routinely given haven and official voice in both the U.K. and
America. ...

As Stratfor notes, the British connection to the Chechen
separatists goes farther back. 'During the first Chechen war -- from
1994 to 1996 -- retired U.K. special forces officers trained British
Muslim recruits in British territory to fight in Chechnya,' Stratfor
claims, echoing reports out of Russia. 'Some militants who attended that
training and were later captured told the Russian government.' After
Chechnya gained de facto independence, a scandal apparently erupted in
Russia-U.K. relations when de-mining instructors from a private security
firm, which included American ex-military personnel, were caught
'training Chechen militants how to launch mine and bombing attacks
against Russian troops,' according to Stratfor.."

"Why would a group of leading American neo-conservatives, dedicated to
fighting Islamic terror, have climbed into bed with Chechen rebels
linked to al-Qaeda? The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC),
which includes Pentagon supremo Richard Perle, says the conflict
between Russia and Chechnya is about Chechen nationalism, not terrorism.
The ACPC savaged Russia for the atrocities its forces have committed in
the Caucuses, said President Vladimir Putin was 'ridiculous', claimed
Russia was more 'morally' to blame for the bloodshed than Chechen
separatists and played down links between al-Qaeda and the 'Chechen
resistance'. The ACPC's support for the Chechen cause seems bizarre, as
many of its members are among the most outspoken US policymakers who
have made it clear that Islamist terror must be wiped out. But the
organisation has tried to broker peace talks between Russia and Chechen
separatists. The ACPC includes many leaders of the neo-conservative
think-tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which advocates
American domination of the world....

ACPC executive director Glen
Howard said the continuation of the 'brutalising tactics' of Russian
forces would only lead to 'the resistance employing more brutal tactics'
like the assault on School Number One in Beslan...... The nurturing of
Chechen fighters against Russia recalls America's support for the
Mujahideen in Afghanistan - an act that went on to spawn al-Qaeda and
the Taliban.... Howard said hardliners like Richard Perle were backing
Chechnya as they 'understood what it feels like to be under the Russian
yolk'. Some critics believe the support for the Chechens may be a cold
war hangover or part of a policy to keep Russia weak through
bloodletting in the Caucuses.... According to Howard, due to the vast
energy resources in the Caucuses, the West, which is heavily dependent
on foreign energy, has strategic interests in the area to which it
cannot afford to turn a blind eye."

With
increasing frequency, Russian officials are charging that
Islamic fighters, weapons and funds are being funneled via Georgia and
Azerbaijan to terrorist groups in the North Caucasus. Such charges
have been aired in recent days by Russia's Foreign Minister Igor
Ivanov, Federation Council Chairman Yegor Stroev, Duma Chairman
Gennady Seleznev, Duma Defense Committee Chairman Roman Popkovich, and
Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov (head of the Defense Ministry's Main
Department for International Military Cooperation). None of these has
cited any supportive evidence.

The
timing and venue of some of these statements adds to their
significance. Ivanov spoke out on the subject as he emerged from a
meeting with President Boris Yeltsin; Stroev, following a closed-door
session of the Federation Council on the events in the North Caucasus;
and Seleznev as the Duma included those accusations in a special
resolution on the situation in the Caucasus. This seems to reflect a
growing political backing in Moscow for the use of pressure on
Azerbaijan and Georgia, as was the case during the 1995-96
Russian-Chechen war, when Moscow made similar allegations which it was
never able to substantiate.

In
Baku, senior presidential adviser Vafa Guluzade and National Security
Minister Namig Abbasov dismissed the latest charges directed at
Azerbaijan as baseless. But the wording of their statements has been
remarkably restrained, and other Azerbaijani officials have said
nothing. Baku seems intent on preserving the recent, slight warm-up in
its bilateral relations with Russia (see the Monitor, September 10)
against collateral damage from the war in the North Caucasus.

Georgian
officials, for their part, have been more forthright in discussing
the potential implications of Moscow's assertions. State Minister
[equivalent to prime minister] Vazha Lortkipanidze, who is known for
his conciliatory attitude toward Russia, expressed concern that the
allegations might presage "an attempt to involve Georgia in the North
Caucasus conflict and destabilize the situation in Georgia itself."
President Eduard Shevardnadze's adviser on international law, Levan
Aleksidze, urged Russia to "stop painting Georgia in the enemy's image"
and described the situation in the North Caucasus as evidence of
Moscow's "policy error" of supporting separatism in the South even as
it combats "separatism" in the North. Georgia's border troops
commander, Lieutenant-General Valery Chkheidze, termed the accusations
against Georgia "demagogic," designed for internal political
consumption.

These Georgian officials, and an official statement of Georgia's
Foreign Ministry, all underscored Georgia's interest in upholding the
principle of territorial integrity and preservation of existing
borders. Azerbaijani President Haidar Aliev--during talks with a
Council of Europe delegation in Baku--emphasized Azerbaijan's interest
in upholding the same principles and in thwarting Islamic
fundamentalism. Specifically, Aliev mentioned Azerbaijan's interest in
the restoration of stability in neighboring Dagestan (Itar-Tass,
Turan, Azad-Inform, Radio Tbilisi, Prime-News, September 14-19;
Nezavisimaya gazeta, September 15).

For several years Kremlin
spokespersons have identified Turkey as the primary source of foreign
jihadi volunteers (always referred to as naemniky, "mercenaries" in
official proclamations) fighting alongside their Chechen adversaries.
One spokesman claimed "We keep killing armed Turkish citizens on
Chechen territory" and another described Turkey as "a record breaker
for producing foreign mercenaries killed in Chechnya." [1] While
skeptics might be tempted to dismiss such claims as mere bluster in
light of Turkey's well known secular tendencies, the evidence is
mounting that Turkish volunteer fighters make up a sizeable component
of the foreign element fighting alongside the indigenous Chechen
insurgents in Russia. While it is widely recognized that the 100-200
foreign jihadis fighting alongside the approximately 1,200 Chechen
insurgents are led by Arab emirs (commanders) such as the slain Amir
Khattab (a Saudi whose mother was Turkish according to jihadist
websites), Abu Walid (Saudi killed April 2004), and Abu Hafs al Urdani
(aka "Amjet" a Jordanian), the Russian government has consistently
maintained that Turks play a prominent role among the foreign
"terrorists" in Chechnya. [2]

To support their claims, Russian security
services have produced Turkish passports found on the bodies of several
slain fighters and have given the names and personal details of
Turkish jihadis killed in Chechnya. Among others, Russian spokespersons
referenced one Ziya Pece, a Turk who was found dead with a grenade
launcher following a fire fight with Federal forces. Russian officials
have also provided detailed information on 24 Turkish fighters killed
between 1999 and 2004, and Russian soldiers in Chechnya have spoken of
engaging a unit of 40 skilled Turkish fighters. [3] If this were not
compelling enough evidence, Russian security forces have also produced a
living Turkish jihadi named Ali Yaman who was captured in the Chechen
village of Gekhi-Chu.

A Turkish Platoon in Chechnya

Surprisingly, this evidence is not refuted by Chechen or Turkish jihadi
sources and on the contrary has been corroborated on such forums as
the kavkaz.org website produced by Arab and Chechen extremists linked
to the field commander Shamil Basayev. The following excerpt from a
kavkaz interview with a Turkish jihadi commander in Chechnya is
illuminating and suggests the existence of a Turkish jamaat known as
the "Ottoman platoon" in the Arab-dominated International Islamic
Brigade (it also corroborates the above Russian claim that Federal
forces have killed 24 Turks in Chechnya): "Interview with the Chief of
the Turkish Jamaat ‘Osmanly' (Ottoman) fighting in Chechnya against the
troops of Russian invaders, Amir (Commander) Muhtar, by the Kavkaz
Center news agency: (Interviewer) Are there many Turks in Chechnya
today? Some mass media were reporting that there are about 20 of you
guys.

(Amir Muhtar) Out of the first Jamaat that was fighting in 1995-1996
seven mujahideen have remained. Back then there were 13 of us. They are
actually the core of the Turkish jamaat in Chechnya today. Twenty-four
Turks have already died in this war. Among them was Zachariah,
Muhammed-Fatih, Halil…Three mujahideen became shaheeds (martyrs) during
the battle with commandos from Pskov in the vicinity of Ulus-Kert.
Some died before that in the battles in Jokhar (Grozny). Five were
wounded." [4] In February 2004 a Turkish jihadi website devoted to
Chechnya also announced the martyrdom (shehid olmak) of three Turkish
mujahideen in just two weeks. [5]

Another site that has been removed
left the following account of the combat that led to the martyrdom of
three Turkish jihadi fighters: "Last night we had news from verifiable
sources that a group of Turkish mujahideen came across Russian soldiers
north of Vedeno in a small village. After stumbling on them a fire
fight ensued and one Algerian and three Turkish brothers died. The
Algerian's name is Hassam and the Turkish brothers' names are Ebu
Derda, Huzeyfe and Zennun. These brothers fought in Commander Ramazan's
unit in the Dagestan conflict." [6]

For several years now Turkish jihadi websites have actually been
posting the martyrdom epitaphs of Turkish fighters who died in the
Chechen cihad. Much of the jihadist rhetoric found on these Islamist
sites will be familiar to those who follow the martyrdom obituaries of
foreign jihadis who have died fighting in Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan and
other conflict zones. The following account, for example, describes
the fate of a Turkish fighter who followed the well worn path of
roaming Turkish jihadis in the Balkans before being killed: "Shaheed
Bilal Al-Qaiseri (Uthman Karkush). 23 years old from Qaiseri, Turkey.
Martyred during the Withdrawal from Grozny, February 2000: Bilal fought
for six months in Bosnia during 1995 from where he unsuccessfully
attempted to travel to Chechnya. He went to fight for the Jihad in
Kosova but returned after a month when the fighting ceased. He came to
Chechnya in August 1999 where he participated in the Dagestan
Operations in Botlikh.

After the Mujahideen withdrew, he was planning
to return to Turkey when Russia invaded Chechnya. He participated in
the fighting in Argun and, subsequently, Grozny. Before and throughout
Ramadan he cooked for the Mujahideen in his group. During the fighting
he was distinguished for his bravery. After seeing a dream in which he
was married, he decided to marry a Chechen, but Shahaadah (martyrdom)
was destined for him instead. He was severely injured during the
withdrawal from Grozny in the village of Katyr Yurt where his room
received a direct hit from Russian Grad Artillery. He was later
martyred from his injuries in the village of Shami Yurt."

Ethnicity and Turkish jihad in Chechnya

The following epitah, which describes a Turkish martyr "with some
Chechen ancestry" speaks of a deeper and less obvious current in the
Turkish jihadi movement that delineates Turkish volunteer fighters from
the majority of trans-national Arab jihadis fighting in Chechnya:
"Shamil (Afooq Qainar). 25 years old from Istanbul, Turkey.

Martyred in Grozny, November 1999:

With some Chechen ancestory, he deeply loved Chechnya and was more
often alongside Chechens than Turks. He had also participated in the
Chechen Jihad of 1996-99. With his good manners, polite demeanor and
modesty, he got along well with everyone. He also took part in the
Dagestan Jihad in the Novalak Region where, notably, his group fought
their way out of a Russian siege at a cost of 25 Shaheed (martyrs). He
was martyred in the second month of this War (November 1999) in
Grozny." [7]

While it might be overlooked, the fact that the slain Shamil is, like
many of his compatriots, of Chechen extraction, is of tremendous
importance. It would seem that many Turks who volunteer to fight on the
behalf of the Chechens do so because they have ethnic origins in the
Caucasus region or identify with the Chechens as irkdashlar (kin).

In the 19th century, Tsarist Russia instigated a brutal policy of
ethnic cleansing that saw tens of thousands of indigenous Caucasian
highlanders expelled to Anatolia. While public expressions of Laz,
Circassian, Kosovar, Bosniak, Tatar and Chechen ethnic identity were
subsequently discouraged in officially homogenous Republican Turkey,
folk traditions such as the famous Caucasian highlander sword dances,
Albanian borek (pastry), Crimean Tatar destans (legends), and
ritualized commemoration of past victimization at the hands of
Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians and others continued.

It was only with the liberalization of Turkey under President Turgut
Ozal in the early 1990s that these historical sub-ethnic grievances
could be expressed in the public sphere. As this unprecedented
celebration of ethnicity and commemoration of past repression took
place in a liberalizing Turkey, Turks were confronted with horrifying
images from the Balkans and Caucasus. Stories of rape camps in Bosnia,
mass graves in Kosovo, and televised images of columns of pitiful
Chechen refugees in Russia struck many Turks as a replay of the
apocalyptic destruction of millions of Balkan-Caucasian-Ukrainian
Muslims by Orthodox Christians in the 19th century.

As a result, informants interviewed by the author in Turkey in the
summer of 2004 claimed that many young men from villages in Eastern
Turkey inhabited by people of Caucasian origin were told by their
family patriarchs to go and fight for their honor, faith, and ancestral
homeland in Chechnya. Moreover, with the advent of the internet in
Turkey, gruesome images of horribly mutilated Chechen women and
children, mass burials and vandalized mosques appeared on Islamist and
secular-nationalist websites alike and enraged many traditionalists in
the country. In this climate, both nationalists and religious
extremists exploited many Turks' sense of ethnic or religious
solidarity with their Chechen "brothers and sisters" and invoked strong
feelings of namus (a traditional sense of machismo, pride and honor
among Turks that comes from the defense of faith, family, motherland,
and honor of one's women).

Like the Turks who continue to fight and die in Chechnya, the websites
that glorify the defense of the Chechens run the gamut from the
anti-American/Zionist rhetoric of the Islamists to the nationalist
irredentism of the Pan-Turkists. But the latter predominate. [8] The
pro-Chechen websites with an ethnic dimension tend to feature images of
Turks wearing traditional Caucasian folk costumes and 19th century
anti-Russian heroes. Others with a slightly more nationalist bent (such
as www.kafka.4t.com/photos.html)
blend images of Ataturk and Alparslan Turkes (the founder of the
Turkish xxx Kurt-Grey Wolves extreme nationalist party) with images from
Chechnya. As these sites make clear, many Turks who fight in Chechnya
are engaging in the same sort of volunteerism that led Albanian
Americans to go fight in Kosovo in 1999 under the auspices of Homeland
Calling and other widely recognized diasporic organizations.

This ethnic diaspora narrative might also explain some of the Arab
jihadi participation in Chechnya. Many Chechen refugees settled in
Ottoman Jordan following their expulsion from Russia in the 19th
century. Jordanian Arabs of Chechen extraction, such as the influential
Sheikh Muhammad Fatih, have played an important role in the Chechen
jihad as warriors, preachers, and fund raisers.

Notwithstanding the involvement of Turks in the Chechen conflict, it
would be erroneous to interpret this as proof that secular Turkey faces
a serious Islamist problem. Turkish jihadis who have fought in
Chechnya have found the Wahhabi Puritanism of their Arab jihadi
comrades-in-arms unsettling, and many secular Turks partake in "jihad
tours" simply to gain prestige at home in their tight knit families or
neighborhoods. In addition, the vast majority of Turks interviewed
tended to view Chechens as "terrorists" who reminded them of the hated
Kurdish PKK/Kadek militants.

Finally, the involvement of two Turkish extremists (Azad Ekinci and
Habib Akdas) who had a history of jihadi activity in Chechnya in the
bloody al-Qaeda bombings in Istanbul in November 2003 further
undermined the Chechen cause in the country. [9] Indeed for all the
romantic notions, some Turks have of volunteering to fight on behalf of
the Chechens, the carnage wreaked on innocent Turks by El Kaide Turka
(Turkish al-Qaeda) clearly demonstrates that jihadism has a potentially
unpredictable effect on those who are attracted to it.

The
Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover
agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975. If
you think that’s a few spies too many — spies earning as much as
$100,000 per assignment — one doesn’t have to go too deep into their
track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible
for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings that have stopped major
domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American
soil.

Another thing those agents are responsible
for, however, is plotting those very schemes. The FBI has in recent
years used trained informants not just to snitch on suspected
terrorists, but to set them up from the get-go. A recent report put
together by Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the
University of California-Berkley analyses some striking statistics
about the role of FBI informants in terrorism cases that the Bureau has
targeted in the decade since the September 11 attacks.

The
report reveals that the FBI regularly infiltrates communities where
they suspect terrorist-minded individuals to be engaging with others.
Regardless of their intentions, agents are sent in to converse within
the community, find suspects that could potentially carry out “lone
wolf” attacks and then, more or less, encourage them to do so. By
providing weaponry, funds and a plan, FBI-directed agents will encourage
otherwise-unwilling participants to plot out terrorist attacks, only
to bust them before any events fully materialize.

Additionally,
one former high-level FBI officials speaking to Mother Jones says
that, for every informant officially employed by the bureau, up to
three unofficial agents are working undercover. The FBI has used those
informants to set-up and thus shut-down several of the more high
profile would-be attacks in recent years. The report reveals that the
Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York City subway plot, the
attempt to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and dozens more were all
orchestrated by FBI agents. In fact, reads the report, only three of the
more well-known terror plots of the last decade weren’t orchestrated
by FBI-involved agents.

The report reveals that
in many of the stings, important meetings between informants and the
unknowing participants are left purposely unrecorded, as to avoid any
entrapment charges that could cause the case to be dismissed. Perhaps
the most high-profile of the FBI-proposed plots was the case of the
Newburgh 4. Around an hour outside of New York City, an informant
infiltrated a Muslim community and engaged four local men to carry out a
series of attacks. Those men may have never actually carried out an
attack, but once the informant offered them a plot and a pair of
missiles, they agreed. Defense attorneys cried “entrapment,” but the
men still were sentenced to 25 years apiece.

"The
problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would
not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents,"
Martin Stolar tells Mother Jones. Stolar represented the suspect
involved in a New York City bombing plot that was set-up by FBI agents.
"They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror." For their part, the FBI says this method is a plan for "preemption," "prevention" and "disruption."

The
report also reveals that, of the 500-plus prosecutions of
terrorism-related cases they analyzed, nearly half of them involved the
use of informants, many of whom worked for the FBI in exchange for
money or to work off criminal charges. Of the 158 prosecutions carried
out, 49 defendants participated in plots that agent provocateurs
arranged on behalf of the FBI.

Experts note that the chance of winning a terrorism-related trial, entrapment or not, is near impossible. "The
plots people are accused of being part of — attacking subway systems
or trying to bomb a building — are so frightening that they can
overwhelm a jury," David Cole, a Georgetown University law
professor, tells Mother Jones. Since 9/11, almost two-thirds of the
cases linked to terrorism have ended with guilty pleas.

“They don't say, 'I've been entrapped,' or, 'I was immature,’” a retired FBI official remarks. All
of this and those guilty pleas often stem for just being in the right
place at the wrong time. Farhana Khera of the group Muslim Advocate
notes that agents go into mosques on “fishing expeditions” just to see
where they can get interest in the community. "The FBI is now telling agents they can go into houses of worship without probable cause," says Khera. "That raises serious constitutional issues."

From
the set-up to the big finish, the whole sting operation is ripe with
constitutional issues such as that. A decade since 9/11, however, the
FBI is reaching through whatever means it can pull together to keep
terrorists — or whom they think could someday become one — from ever
hurting America.

Defense
attorneys say an alleged plot to bomb New York synagogues was hatched
and directed by a federal informant. Lawyers for four men from Newburgh
have filed a motion to dismiss the terror indictment against them. They
said the informant badgered the defendants until they got involved in
the plot. They said the informant chose the targets, supplied fake bombs
for the synagogues and a fake missile to shoot down planes. The motion
said he also offered to pay the defendants, who attorneys alleged
weren't inclined toward any crime until the informant began recruiting
them.

"The government
well knew that their case had been a government-inspired creation from
day one and that the defendants had not been independently seeking
weapons or targets," the motion said.Federal court spokesman Herb Hadad
said the government would file its response next month. The four men,
who were arrested last May, face up to life in prison if convicted. They
have been previously identified as James Cromitie, 55, David Williams,
28, Onta Williams, 32, and Laguerre Payen, 27, all of Newburgh in
upstate New York, where authorities were conducting raids at their
homes, sources said.

Authorities
have said they had the plotters under surveillance since June of 2008
and there was "no chance" the alleged scheme could succeed. They
credited the work of a long time informant with keeping tabs on the
group. The FBI
has said the Muslim suspects were angry and full of hate for America.
According to the criminal complaint, Cromitie said "I hate those f-ing
Jewish bastards." He bragged that it would be a "piece of cake" to bomb a
Jewish Center in Riverdale, according to the complaint. He said his
father lives in Afghanistan and he was upset about U.S. military presence there. "The fact that this type of hatred exists means that we all have to be vigilant all of the time," city councilman Jeffrey Dinowitz said Thursday.

Cromitie
was the first to approach the informant, authorities said. He told the
informant he has ties to the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad.
Authorities said Cromitie had 27 past arrests and had recently been
working at a nation-wide discount retailer, authorities said. Several of
the suspects have previously been arrested on drug charges and may have
converted to Islam in prison, authorities said. The four men allegedly
would meet in a safe house in Newburgh,
which authorities said they had bugged with audio and video equipment.
The suspects said they wanted to get their hands on stinger missiles to
shoot down planes at the nearby Air National Guard Base at Stewart Airport,
according to a criminal complaint unsealed late Wednesday. The suspects
also received what they believed were two stinger missiles which they
intended to use to shoot down military planes, the complaint said. They
also bought cell phones to allegedly use in the plot.

Officials
said they moved in when they did so the alleged plot could not progress
any further. In a separate motion, defense attorneys demanded more
information on inducements that the informant may have offered the
defendants. The dismissal motion identified the government's agent as
Shaheed Hussain, a "professional informant" for the FBI. The defense
claimed he was directed to visit suburban mosques, find members with
anti-American leanings and recruit them to join a fake terror plot
supposedly funded by a Pakistan-based group. He suggested there could be
as much as $250,000 available and the government provided him with a
BMW, a Hummer and other cars to make him appear well-funded, the defense
filings said.

The
defense alleged that Hussain tried to incite the defendants by blaming
Jews for the world's evil and telling them that attacks against
non-Muslims were endorsed by Islam. Nevertheless, they said, he failed
to motivate the defendants to any action on their own. Months went by
between meetings, and the filings quote Cromitie as saying, "I'm not
gonna hurt anybody" and "The plane thing ... is out of the question."
Hussain suggested the targets, paid for the defendants' groceries,
bought a gun, provided the fake bombs and missile, assembled the
explosive devices and acted as chauffeur, the defense said. Since the
9/11 attacks, authorities have arrested suspects in a number of alleged
plots against area targets, including the Fort Dix New Jersey military base, John F. Kennedy Airport, the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge.

On
December 25 the United States authorities arrested a 23-year-old
Nigerian Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab aboard a Delta Airline flight from
Amsterdam that landed in Detroit. News reports emanating from the U.S.
indicate that it was an attempted terrorist attack that resulted in the
fire and that Abdul Mutallab was either connected with Al-Qaida or
sympathetic to its aims.

However,
this incident raises a number of serious questions about the character
of the attack. First of all why was Abdul Mutallab granted a
multiple-entry visa into the United States in June 2008? In November,
his father, Alhaji Umaru Abdul Mutallab, 70, a prominent and wealthy
Nigerian banker who recently retired as Chairman of the First Bank Plc
of Nigeria, warned the American embassy in Nigeria about concerns
related to his son’s behaviour. The senior Mutallab also served as
Minister of Economic Development and Reconstruction during the mid-1970s
in the Federal Nigerian Government that was under military rule at the
time.

Consequently,
why was Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab allowed to maintain his U.S. visa
status and board a plane bound for the United States? There have been
reports that he had spent time in the United Arab Emirates and Yemen and
implying that this may indicate a connection with Al-Qaida. However,
there has been no specific evidence that he has links with Islamic
organizations including Al-Qaida.

In
addition, corporate media reports claim that the substances Mutallab
had and attempted to ignite could have done substantial damage to the
aircraft. This allegation is largely unsubstantiated and raises further
questions about the nature of the incident. If these chemicals could
have never caused any real damage to the aircraft and in fact the
suspect was the only person seriously injured, then this may reveal that
the incident is something other than what is being widely reported by
media outlets in the U.S. and internationally.

Although
U.S.. intelligence and media spokespersons have stated that Yemen is a
base for Al-Qaida, they do not make the claim that it is also major
field of operations for the American Central Intelligence Agency which
is working closely with the Yemeni government to fight the Islamic
organizations that are in a military struggle with the government in
this country that is divided politically and regionally.

In
an Associated Press report on December 25 it stated that “Yemen’s
military hit suspected al-Qaida hideouts for the second time in a week,
killing at least 30 militants in a remote area of the country–a
fragmented, unstable nation the U.S. fears could turn into an
Afghanistan-like refuge for the terrorist network.

“The
strikes on Thursday, which were carried out with U.S. and Saudi
intelligence help, hit a gathering of top leaders and other targets in a
remote mountain valley, officials said. The newly aggressive Yemeni
campaign against al-Qaida is being boosted by a dose of American aid, a
reflection of Washington’s concerns about al-Qaida’s presence in a
highly strategic location on the border with oil-rich ally Saudi
Arabia.” (AP, December 25)

This
same AP article goes on to point out that “The Pentagon recently
confirmed it has poured nearly $70 million in military aid into Yemen
this year–compared with none in 2008. The U.S. military has boosted its
counterterrorism training for Yemeni forces and is providing more
intelligence, according to U.S. officials and analysts.. The result
appears to be a sharp escalation in Yemen’s campaign against al-Qaida,
which previously amounted to scattered raids against militants, mixed
with tolerance of some fighters who made vague promises they would avoid
terrorist activity.”

Therefore,
it is quite obvious that Yemen is a major target of U.S. military and
intelligence activity. Corporate media reports continue to emphasize
what it calls the unstable character of Yemen and labeling the country a
“failed state”, as it did with Afghanistan during the invasion of 2001.

Also
Nigeria has been the scene of unrest in the North several months ago
where the military and police killed several hundred people in a
crackdown against an Islamic group, Boko Haram, where the leader of this
group was killed by the police extra-judiciously. There is also a flare
up in fighting in the Niger Delta region between groups fighting the
western-based oil firms that dominate the area and the federal
government’s joint terrorism task force.

In
a just as significant recent development, several western-based
multi-national oil firms are threatening to sabotage the Nigerian
economy because of their displeasure with a deal that was agreed upon
with the People’s Republic of China involving a $50 billion petroleum
revenue generation project related to the export of oil to China. Shell
is offering its operations for sale which will inevitably undermine the
oil industry in Nigeria, which no longer is the dominant producer on oil
on the continent.

These
developments cannot be separated from the recent escalation of the U.S.
war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. President Obama announced at West
Point military academy on December 1 that his administration would be
sending another 30,000 occupation troops into Afghanistan. This act is
being carried out despite the overwhelming opposition to the escalation
of the Afghan war by people inside the United States.

In
Detroit, the FBI assassinated an African-American Imam on October 28.
The investigation into the incident is being obstructed on several
levels including the refusal of authorities to release the autopsy of
the slain Islamic leader, Imam Luqman Ameen Abudllah, who had worked
with the poor for decades on the city’s west side. Imam Abdullah’s
assassination has drawn protests and calls for an independent
investigation into his assassination by agents of the federal
government.

Could
Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab be a pawn in a possible scenario of
international intelligence intrigue controlled and manipulated by the
United States? Such threats of terrorism have been used in the past to
deflect the attention of the American people away from the worsening
economic and political crisis facing the country. Since 2001 the
American people have been subjected to reports of one plot and
conspiracy after another. During the entire decade trillions of dollars
have been literally stolen from the people of the United States through
real estate, insurance and bank fraud schemes which the taxpayers have
absorbed. Unemployment rates are the highest since the Great Depression
and there will be a new upsurge in home foreclosures and evictions
during 2010.

If
Farouk Umar Abdul Mutallab was in contact with people he may have
thought were al-Qaida operatives but were in fact CIA agents posing as
Islamic resistance leaders, he could have been brainwashed and convinced
to embark upon such a futile effort with the United States intelligence
personnel knowing that these chemicals would, in all likelihood, only
injure the suspect.

The
incident of course will be used to intensify security practices in
airports and throughout American society. It can also be utilized in
attempts to justify and sway public opinion towards supporting the wars
of occupation in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and the extension of
these imperialist efforts into Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Aden, the
Indian Ocean and Yemen located in the Arabian Peninsula.

It
is amazing that the Obama administration has said nothing about the
incident in Detroit. Over the next few days more information will be
revealed surrounding these events. One thing is certain and that is the
United States government and ruling class has nothing to offer the
people other than war, intensified domestic security and economic
austerity. If they can bombard the airwaves with threats of terrorism,
it will block any real discussion about the economic crisis in the
corporate-controlled media that is heavily biased towards the Pentagon
and Wall Street. The question of security will take priority over the
economic crisis which has caused the unemployment of 34 million people,
the foreclosures of millions of homes, the closing of hundreds of
schools and the forcing of tens of thousands of university students away
from their studies due to the monumental escalation of fees.

The investigation into the Boston Marathon terrorist attack is now
focused on what is the most important question: Did they act alone? In
my view, the answer is no.

To begin with, the brothers engaged in a firefight
with police and held their own, throwing bombs at the police as they
attempted to flee. Tamerlan was killed in a fusillade of gunfire, but
Dzhokhar managed to get away. At least one of them was very familiar
with firearms and knew how to use them. Neither has any known military
experience: somebody trained one or both. The question is: who?

Tamerlan traveled to Dagestan two years ago, where his father now resides, and together they went to Chechnya. Six months later, Tamerlan returned – and began posting jihadist
videos on his Youtube page. Dagestan, a former Soviet “republic” in
Central Asia, has been torn apart by a Muslim fundamentalist insurgency for years, and is one of the most dangerous countries on earth.

There are unconfirmed reports that the explosive devices which caused such mayhem at the marathon were set off by a sophisticated
triggering mechanism, which, according to an unnamed law enforcement
official, aren’t the kind of thing you can jigger from information
garnered from a Google search. The same unconfirmed report says
authorities are frantically trying to uncover what they believe is a
“12-man sleeper cell,” and although this seems like an extravagant claim
– how did they come up with the number 12? – I wouldn’t discount it
entirely.

Initial speculation as to the motives for the attack centered around
the brothers’ ethnicity and religious views, and these indeed seem to be
important. Nineteen year old Dzokhar had a Twitter account,
where he posted the usual trivia one might associate with a typical
American teenager – along with a few comments explicitly expressing his
religious beliefs and his frustration with people who believe all
Muslims are terrorists. His tweets, usually light-hearted, took on a
darker aspect just prior to the Boston attack: on April 15 he tweeted:
“Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people.”

The content of Dzokhar’s Russian Facebook page
includes a video dramatizing the persecution of Muslims in Syria, and
another one featuring some kind of religious discussion. There is also a
video of Tamerlan, who is speaking in Russian, mocking the various
accents he encountered in Central Asia. There are also links to
Dzokhar’s favorite internet sites, including salamworld, an Islamic
version of Facebook, and various similar sites.

Tamerlan was undoubtedly a devout Muslim at this point in his life.
His relatives all point to a period starting about two years ago when he
became very religious: he was reportedly asked to leave the house of one of them when he went to visit them in Dagestan. A friend of his wife describes
him as “intense,” “controlling,” and “manipulative” in her account of
his growing religiosity and his insistence that his wife convert to
Islam, wear the hijab, and behave like a good Muslim wife.

Nearly unnoticed in the dramatic denouement of Dzokhar’s capture: the apprehension of three people, including Dzokhar’s alleged girlfriend, in nearby New Bedford. The three were later released, but authorities reappeared
at their apartment complex on Saturday and apparently detained two of
the same men, who are reportedly from Kazakhstan: a van with consular
license plates had earlier turned up in front of the complex, and a
young woman was seen entering the van in a hurry. The Tsarnaev brothers
weren’t lone nuts: they had help.

One important detail is that the Russian security apparatus asked the
Americans to investigate Tamerlan before he made his trip to Russia two
years ago. Here
is the FBI statement, with its ass-covering final paragraph averring
“The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional
information from the foreign government.” However, according to a senior
congressional aide cited by the Boston Globe, the fault lies with the FBI: “The FBI had this guy on the radar and somehow he fell off.” And the Daily Mailreports:

“Russia reportedly asked the FBI to investigate one of the alleged
Boston bombers just six months ago after he was seen meeting an Islamic
militant six times – but the agency never responded, it has emerged.”

In addition, Tamerlan reportedly
came to the attention of the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston,
probably on account of his altercation, three months ago, with the head
of a local mosque, who threw him out for expressing radical views. The
Tsarnaev brothers’ uncle, who lives in the US, has said this has nothing
to do with Chechnya, or the Chechen independence movement, and that
it’s simply the fact that the brothers were “losers” which explains
their actions: yet he also points to alleged “mentors”
who supposedly radicalized Tamerlan in the United States – he
specifically referred to an Armenian convert to Islam who purportedly
lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet this information, if true, hardly
rules out an overseas connection: he may have been radicalized in
America and sought out compatriots on his Russia trip, where he
reportedly met with a known Chechen “militant.” (“six times,” according to the Daily Mail).

Aside from these religious and regional connections, there is a link
to criminality that may or may not be significant. Tamerlan – a boxing champion
who represented New England in the Golden Gloves competition – once
introduced the owner of his gym to one Brendan Mess, whom he described
as his “best friend.” Mess was murdered
on the afternoon of September 12, 2011, in his apartment, with two
others: all three had been stabbed to death, their bloody bodies left
covered in marijuana. Mess was 25: he had been arrested prior to that
for possession of marijuana with intent to sell, and at least one of the
other two had arrests for petty crimes, like assault, and, like
Tamerlan, were into physical fitness. At the end of the above-linked
news article, a neighbor is quoted: “According to her, five men lived in
the apartment and they were frequently coming in and out. One of the
men drove a Mercedes-Benz, she added.” Tamerlan drove a Mercedes,
according to this account:
was he one of the five men who lived at that address? Or did he just
spend a lot of time there, so much that the neighbor thought he must
live there?

In any case, there was apparently some kind of drug-dealing business
operating on the premises, but whoever killed Mess and his two friends
left the drugs behind, ruling out a pecuniary motive. What’s more, they
were stabbed with what appeared to be a pick axe or similar weapon: all
three died from massive cuts to the neck. A symbolic beheading? A
gangland hit? Did a newly converted Tamerlan suddenly turn on his “best friend”? The murder is unsolved to this day.

If Tamerlan’s best friend had a drug-dealing/gangland connection, and if the elder Tsarnaev brother – undoubtedly the dominant figure in the bomb plot – was involved in some manner, then that is interesting in and of itself.

The Chechen insurgency is deeply involved in the sale of illegal
drugs, and the Chechen Mafia, known as the Obshina, has an ideological
as well as a criminal character. A good account of the big overlap
between the Obshina and the Chechen guerrilla movement can be found in
the late Paul Klebnikov’s Conversations With A Barbarian, which consists of extensive interviews with Chechen Mafia chieftain Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev,
whose career included financing pro-rebel newspapers as well as forcing
the Russian Mafia out of Moscow and taking over its illicit empire. The
late Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian oligarch whose recent suicide
made headlines, made good use
of the Obshina in his efforts to dominate the Russian car dealership
market. In return for their protection, the oligarch financed
pro-Chechen propaganda and other activities.

Boston’s Chechen community is the largest in the United States, and the Obshina has a presence extending as far West as Portland. According to one study,
in addition to the Russian Mafia, “at least 150 ethnic-oriented Russian
criminal groups had also been identified, including Chechens,
Georgians, Armenians, and Russian-Koreans, of which at least 25 were
active in various parts of the United States, the Caribbean and Latin
America.” Unlike these other Russian-based criminal gangs, the Chechens
have an ideological – and religious – coloration: there are reported links between Al Qaeda and the Chechen Mafia.

So what do we have here? The answer, I’m afraid, is a clear-cut case
of carefully premeditated Islamist terrorism with an overseas
connection. Tamerlan clearly went to Dagestan, and then Chechnya, where
he received training and instructions. He returned to America, recruited
his brother, and together they carried out the plan. Whether this
operation was coordinated by Al Qaeda, or some other group – possibly
some Chechen fundamentalist faction, which outsourced the operation to
the Obshina – may seem irrelevant, except for the fact that if there is an organized crime connection then we really have a problem on our hands.

The lessons to be drawn from all this? First and foremost, the idea that we can invade other countries – indeed, that we must invade countries like Afghanistan – so as to prevent terrorists from acquiring a “safe haven” is absolute nonsense. We tried that, and it didn’t work. Boston is the proof.

The second lesson is that American officialdom is comprised of hysterics, whose overreaction must have the terrorists chortling in their Chechen lair. A nineteen year old punk succeeded in shutting down a major American city: whoever organized the Boston atrocity can surely count that as a victory.

The third lesson we can draw is that Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham
are opportunists of unusual talent and perspicacity. No sooner had
Dzokhar been caught then these two were all over the media demanding he
be tried as an “enemy combatant,” presumably in secret, and denied a
lawyer. If we ever see a police state imposed in the US – and are we very far
from that now? – McCain and Graham will go down in history as two of
its Founding Fathers. The sooner these two are involuntarily retired,
and driven out of American political life, the better are our chances of
preserving what’s left of our old republic.

As the hunt for Dzokhar went on, I saw a lot of denial on Twitter
amongst liberals who resisted – and still resist – linking the Boston
bombers’ motives to either the Chechen independence movement or radical
Islamist ideology. Yet the evidence is staring them right in the face:
they simply refused to see it because it didn’t confirm their own
politically correct biases.

That simply will not do. Antiwar activists, and those who rightly resist the often violent wave of Islamophobia
that has swept the country since 9/11, are going to have to face facts,
and fight accordingly. Anti-interventionists are actually given more
intellectual and political ammunition on account of this incident, as
pointed out above: the invade-the-world
strategy hasn’t worked. And unless Senators McCain and Graham are going
to be advocating a US invasion of Chechnya and Dagestan, it’s clear the
War Party hasn’t got an answer for this one.

On the other hand, civil libertarians are going to have a harder time
of it: Sen. Graham’s invocation of the New Tyranny’s slogan – “the Homeland is the battlefield”
– is a creepy reminder that we are on the brink of establishing a
police state in this country. The irony is that the police state methods
“legalized” by legislation like the Patriot Act didn’t
pick up on the Boston conspirators’ plans. For all their snooping and
sneaking around, prying into our emails and investigating supposedly
“subversive” individuals and groups – including myself, I might add, and
this web site – they were caught flat-footed.

If and when a connection to Chechen terrorist groups is established, I would think that the West’s longstanding support
for the Chechen cause would be called into question. The US State
Department under both Bush and Obama has routinely sided with the
Chechen separatists, and Britain, in particular, has been their
invaluable ally, granting asylum to Chechen terrorist leaders as well as
their Russian oligarch sponsors, such as Berezovsky. The growing cold
war between Russia and the US no doubt squelched any real cooperation
between Moscow and Washington in tracking terrorists: that’s the real
explanation for the FBI’s failure to take Russian warnings seriously.
And besides that, they were too busy monitoring Antiwar.com and other Americans engaging in legal and constitutionally protected activities to bother with the brothers Tsarnaev.

I almost choked on my coffee listening to neoconservative Rudy
Giuliani pompously claim on national TV that he was surprised about any
Chechens being responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings because he’s
never seen any indication that Chechen extremists harbored animosity
toward the U.S.; Guiliani thought they were only focused on Russia.

Giuliani knows full well how the Chechen “terrorists” proved useful
to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians, much as the Afghan
mujahedeen were used in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1980 to
1989. In fact, many neocons signed up as Chechnya’s “friends,” including
former CIA Director James Woolsey.

Author John Laughland wrote: “the leading group which pleads the
Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC).
The list of the self-styled ‘distinguished Americans’ who are its
members is a roll call of the most prominent neoconservatives who so
enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror.’

“They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott
Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to
the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be ‘a
cakewalk’; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of
the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist
Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military
intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now
president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American
Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a
leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R. James Woolsey, the
former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George
Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.”

The ACPC later sanitized “Chechnya” to “Caucasus” so it’s rebranded
itself as the “American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus.”

Alice in Wonderland is an understatement if you understand the full
reality of what’s going on. But if you can handle going down the rabbit
hole even further, check out prominent former New York Times journalist
(and author of The Commission book) Phil Shenon’s discovery of the incredible “Terrible Missed Chance” a couple of years ago.

Shenon’s discovery involved key information that the FBI and the
entire “intelligence” community mishandled and covered up, not only
before 9/11 but for a decade afterward. And it also related to the exact
point of my 2002 “whistleblower memo” that led to the post 9/11
DOJ-Inspector General investigation about FBI failures and also
partially helped launch the 9/11 Commission investigation.

But still the full truth did not come out, even after Shenon’s
blockbuster discovery in 2011 of the April 2001 memo linking the main
Chechen leader Ibn al Khattab to Osama bin Laden. The buried April 2001
memo had been addressed to FBI Director Louis Freeh (another illegal
recipient of MEK money, by the way!) and also to eight of the FBI’s top
counter-terrorism officials.

Similar memos must have been widely shared with all U.S. intelligence
in April 2001. Within days of terrorist suspect Zaccarias Moussaoui’s
arrest in Minnesota on Aug. 16, 2001, French intelligence confirmed that
Moussaoui had been fighting under and recruiting for Ibn al-Khattab,
raising concerns about Moussaoui’s flight training.

Yet FBI Headquarters officials balked at allowing a search of his
laptop and other property, still refusing to recognize that: 1) the
Chechen separatists were themselves a “terrorist group” for purposes of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s (FISA) legal requirement of
acting “on behalf of a foreign power” and 2) that Moussaoui’s link to
Ibn al Khattab inherently then linked him to bin Laden’s well-recognized
Al Qaeda group for purposes of FISA (the point in my memo).

This all occurred during the same time that CIA Director George Tenet
and other counter-terrorism officials — and don’t forget that Tenet was
apprised of the information about Moussaoui’s arrest around Aug. 24,
2001 — told us their “hair was on fire” over the prospect of a major
terrorist attack and “the system was blinking red.”

The post 9/11 investigations launched as a result of my 2002
“whistleblower memo” did conclude that a major mistake, which could have
prevented or reduced 9/11, was the lack of recognition of al Khattab’s
Chechen fighters as a “terrorist group” for purposes of FISA.

As far as I know, the several top FBI officials, who were the named
recipients of the April 2001 intelligence memo entitled “Bin Laden/Ibn
Khattab Threat Reporting” establishing how the two leaders were “heavily
entwined,” brushed it off by mostly denying they had read the April
2001 memo (which explains why the memo had to be covered up as they
attempted to cover up other embarrassing info).

There are other theories, of course, as to why U.S. officials could
not understand or grasp this “terrorist link.” These involve the U.S.’s
constant operating of “friendly terrorists,” perhaps even al Khattab
himself (and/or those around him), on and off, opportunistically, for
periods of time to go against “enemy” nations, i.e., the Soviet Union,
and regimes we don’t’ like.

Shifting Lines

But officials can get confused when their former covert “assets” turn
into enemies themselves. That’s what has happened with al-Qaeda-linked
jihadists in Libya and Syria, fighters who the U.S. government favored
in their efforts to topple the Qaddafi and Assad regimes, respectively.
These extremists are prone to turn against their American arms suppliers
and handlers once the common enemy is defeated.

The same MO exists with the U.S. and Israel currently collaborating
with the Iranian MEK terrorists who have committed assassinations inside
Iran. The U.S. government has recently shifted the MEK terrorists from
the ranks of “bad” to “good” terrorists as part of a broader campaign to
undermine the Iranian government. For details, see “Our (New) Terrorists, the MEK: Have We Seen This Movie Before?”

Giuliani and his ilk engage, behind the scenes, in all these
insidious operations but then blithely turn to the cameras to spew their
hypocritical propaganda fueling the counterproductive “war on terror”
for public consumption, when that serves their interests. Maybe this
explains Giuliani’s amazement (or feigned ignorance) on Friday morning
after the discovery that the family of the alleged Boston Marathon
bombers was from Chechnya.

My observations are not meant to be a direct comment about the
motivations of the two Boston bombing suspects whose thinking remains
unclear. It’s still very premature and counterproductive to speculate on
their motives.

But the lies and disinformation that go into the confusing and
ever-morphing notion of “terrorism” result from the U.S. Military
Industrial Complex (and its little brother, the “National Security
Surveillance Complex”) and their need to control the mainstream media’s
framing of the story.

So, a simplistic narrative/myth is put forth to sustain U.S. wars.
From time to time, those details need to be reworked and some of the
facts “forgotten” to maintain the storyline about bad terrorists “who
hate the U.S.” when, in reality, the U.S. Government may have nurtured
the same forces as “freedom fighters” against various “enemies.”

The bottom line is to never forget that “a poor man’s war is
terrorism while a rich man’s terrorism is war” – and sometimes those
lines cross for the purposes of big-power politics. War and terrorism
seem to work in sync that way.

Update: I wrote this "Chechens and Neocons" so fast yesterday
and it’s not exactly polished. For instance I almost always put
"terrorists" in quotes because it’s a term that doesn’t have a real
definition or fixed meaning but is just used to manipulate people by
pressing their emotional buttons (fear, hate, greed, false pride and
blind loyalty). But yes, we HAVE seen this movie before! Our corrupt
politicians and neocon-controlled national security-foreign policy
connivers just keep running the same "Charlie Wilson War" script: "they
might be terrorists but they are our terrorists!" Charlie Wilson’s War
was hardly worth seeing the first time as you’ll recall it ended on a
(falsely) high note without showing the blowback of 9-11. But only a few
astute analysts and movie reviewers criticized that big omission.

The opportunistic neocons went on to use Iraqi ex-pat con-artist
Ahmed Chalabi to gin up their war on Iraq and were SO surprised to
discover him later turning on and spying on them. Years later we get
Hillary feigning surprise – almost identical to Guiliani’s! – how could
it be that our Libyan rebel "friends" whom we armed for our common goal
of "regime change" turn against us so quickly and kill our Ambassador?!

What a surprise that opportunism can run in both directions! In fact we
have seen this movie so many times now that we all should be prepared
for the same ending with Syria and Iran. It doesn’t take much
"intelligence" to predict it will also not end well with arming the
"Syrian Al-Qaeda linked rebels" or the Mujahideen-e Khalq
(MEK) groups we are using to commit assassinations and other covert
destabilization in Iran. Former "foreign terrorist organization" MEK just opened an office a block from the White House,
celebrated by half of Washington’s neocons, politicians and "security
officials" (all with their pockets full of MEK money)! Can you spell
OPPORTUNISM?!

You don’t have to observe US foreign policy – and its constant,
reckless efforts to achieve "full spectrum dominance" – very long to
realize that it’s based on a constant
flip flopping between two modes: "whack a mole" military force on the
"bad terrorists" and "enemy of my enemy is my friend" arming and
opportunistic exploiting of "our good terrorists." And the "bad
terrorists" and the "good terrorists" frequently change spots. You’d
think the public would get tired of the same plot and walk out, wouldn’t
ya?!

Other very likely but terribly unfortunate outcomes of the Boston
bombing will most likely be: 1) it will fuel continuation of the
Authorization to Use Military Force along with drone assassinations on
the "global battlefield" illegal stupidity; 2) surveillance cameras will
be installed a thousand times over what they now exist in public places
and 3) the FBI
will argue that they need to redouble their “pre-emptive” targeting of
suspects in their massive database for entrapment schemes.

They will
likely point to the Boston bombing as justification for continuing those
wrongful, counterproductive tactics in order to “prevent” a future
attack when the facts lead to precisely the opposite conclusion that
should be drawn: that if the FBI, NSA, DHS etc were not wasting so much
time collecting irrelevant data on innocents, they might have focused
and followed up better on the Russian tip. The task of seeking a needle
in the haystack is not helped by adding more hay but no one will dare
whisper that.

Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI agent and former chief division
counsel in Minneapolis. She’s now a dedicated peace and justice activist
and board member of the Women Against Military Madness.

'Confusion and inconsistencies': How US plans to distract public from real truth about Boston

The initial questions about the Boston bombing are behind us, but
former FBI employee Sibel Edmonds believes the pursuit of truth will
eventually lead to a far more secret agenda by the US, which she reveals
to RT. The United States is having to quickly wake up to the
possibility that Chechens are not the ‘freedom fighters’ Western
media has been categorizing them as, especially when it came to the
Republic’s relationship to Russia. But even the newly formed
perceptions may not be enough when it comes to investigating the
motives and planning behind the Boston bombing, according to
Edmonds, who is also a founder of the National Security
Whistleblowers Coalition.

With the dust somewhat settled after the capture of the younger
suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Edmonds believes there will only be
more unanswered questions in an investigation already plagued by
obvious inconsistencies and falsities, which she recounts at
length.

RT:We've learned in the last hour that Russia warned the FBI about the older Tsarnaev brother
and his potential links with radical Islamists, but the FBI found
nothing suspicious. How is that possible?

Sibel Edmonds: Actually, we predicted that the unnamed
foreign country [Western media didn’t name the source immediately]
was in fact Russia, two days ago. We have too little facts, too
much false information and speculations. But just look at the
period they are talking about. When you listen to the suspect’s
mother, she’s talking about a period of three to five years.
According to FBI officials, they received this information, this
warning, in 2011. So we have that inconsistency right there. The
other important inconsistency that we should pay attention to is
the mother’s description of FBI mannerisms and conversation with
the suspects and the family when they were visiting them for the
last three to five years. That fits exactly the recruitment style
of the intelligence community. When you go to the suspects, and one
moment you’re saying “We know you’re decent, we know you’re
doing nothing wrong, we know you’re good”, and the next minute
they’re saying “You can be dangerous”, right after receiving
that information from the Russian government, to threaten them with
that information for what purpose – to recruit them as informants
or for other agendas.

RT:We spoke to the mother last night. She said there
is no way on earth they could have been involved in a heinous
crime like this, that she knew everything about them and they could
not have been potential terrorists. However, could there be another
side to these people that they didn’t even let their mother know,
is that not feasible?

SE: Well, again, we don’t have real information from our
source in the last 48hours. I found out that they had been
associating the brothers – especially the older one –with very
wealthy individual Turkish persons, some of them students in
Boston, some businessmen…really modern people. And we haven’t
received any information that they [the brothers] had been
associating with Chechens, even the radicals. So that itself is
another major inconsistency in this story.

RT:Similarities are being drawn between the 'pressure
cooker' bombs used in Boston and those which Al Qaeda gets
English-speaking terrorists to use. Just how much does this prove
in terms of the bombers' links with the terrorist group?

SE: Again, it’s way too early to comment on this and I
think that whole notion right now sounds really, really weak.
Because the US government, when it is convenient, one minute talk
about how sophisticated Al Qaeda has become – in fact they’re as
sophisticated as the NSA [US National Security Agency] – they are
talking about their ability to obtain laptop, or suitcase bombs,
nuclear bombs…and the next moment they are talking about this
amateurish home-made ability. So, as far as the government is
concerned, I think it’s too early to buy this either from the US
media or the government. This situation is really similar to the Bin Laden shooting.
Every day the story changed. And this is what we are going to see
in the next few days. They are going to change the story, they are
going to throw so much confusion and inconsistencies and
conflicting data that no one is going to figure out what actually
happened, especially if the second suspect dies.

RT:There's been a tendency in the Western media to
portray armed groups in the Chechnya as freedom fighters. Is that
going to change at all after this?

SE: We all have to really look at the timing of this,
because again the US media is portraying this incident by itself.
It’s not putting it in the context of things that have been
happening in the past – let’s say one year so – or recent stuff –
we had this case of NGOs being shut down by the Russian government,
which was a very smart move, because we know that the majority of
these NGOs have CIA agendas, as they’re operated and managed by CIA
people. And this is one way of infiltrating Russia by the US
government, the CIA. And on the other hand, from this side, we had
the 12 individuals from Russia, and what the US has done.

So, if you start putting these in context and also add the fact
that Russia has been the biggest obstacle for the United States to
get in and directly attack Syria – that’s when you start to see the
bigger picture and that’s what the people should be paying
attention to. And as far as the perception, up until recently you
had individuals like Bolton, Armitage… in a group called The
Friends of Chechnya, and they have been around for a while. Again,
the false information that is being put forth by US media is that
since the fall of the Soviet Union the United States has refrained
from intervening in the Russia-Chechnya situation. And that is
purely false. Since mid-1990’s, the US directly, or through Turkey
has been arming, training, managing, orchestrating not only
Chechens but also other factions in the region – and we are
looking at Central Asia and the Caucasus. And of course the
Russian government is fully aware of this.

RT:What about those resources?

SE: Alternative media has been waiting and reporting on
this for years – the US operations in the region against Russia.
And we are kind of puzzled in terms of the silence from the Russian
government, because the FSB at any given moment can put a lot of
information that would expose the fact that we actually are in the
business of crating terrorists and bringing about terrorism in the
region, as we have done for the last several decades in the Middle
East, but especially since the fall of the Soviet Union – in
Central Asia and the Caucasus. And again, there are tons of facts
backing this up and there is much more in the hands of the Russian
government, and I think this is a pretty good opportunity for some
of this information to come out and enlighten the American public
here in the United States.

Debkafiles: The Tsarnaev brothers were double agents who decoyed US into terror trap

The big questions buzzing over Boston Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev have a single answer: It emerged in the 102 tense hours between
the twin Boston Marathon bombings Monday, April 15 – which left three
dead, 180 injured and a police officer killed at MIT - and Dzohkhar’s
capture Friday, April 19 in Watertown. The conclusion reached by debkafile’s
counterterrorism and intelligence sources is that the brothers were
double agents, hired by US and Saudi intelligence to penetrate the
Wahhabi jihadist networks which, helped by Saudi financial
institutions, had spread across the restive Russian Caucasian.

Instead, the two former Chechens betrayed their mission and went secretly over to the radical Islamist networks. By this tortuous path, the brothers earned the dubious distinction of
being the first terrorist operatives to import al Qaeda terror to the
United States through a winding route outside the Middle East – the
Caucasus. This broad region encompasses the autonomous or semi-autonomous Muslim
republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya, North
Ossetia and Karachyevo-Cherkesiya, most of which the West has never
heard of.

Moscow however keeps these republics on a tight military and
intelligence leash, constantly putting down violent resistance by the
Wahhabist cells, which draw support from certain Saudi sources and funds
from the Riyadh government for building Wahhabist mosques and schools
to disseminate the state religion of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis feared that their convoluted involvement in the Caucasus
would come embarrassingly to light when a Saudi student was questioned
about his involvement in the bombng attacks while in a Boston hospital
with badly burned hands.

They were concerned to enough to send Saudi Foreign Minister Prince
Saudi al-Faisal to Washington Wednesday, April 17, in the middle of the
Boston Marathon bombing crisis, for a private conversation with
President Barack Obama and his national security adviser Tom Donilon on
how to handle the Saudi angle of the bombing attack.

That day too, official Saudi domestic media launched an extraordinary
three-day campaign. National and religious figures stood up and
maintained that authentic Saudi Wahhabism does not espouse any form of
terrorism or suicide jihadism and the national Saudi religion had
nothing to do with the violence in Boston. “No matter what the
nationality and religious of the perpetrators, they are terrorists and
deviants who represent no one but themselves.”

Prince Saud was on a mission to clear the 30,000 Saudi students in
America of suspicion of engaging in terrorism for their country or
religion, a taint which still lingers twelve years after 9/11. He was
concerned that exposure of the Tsarnaev brothers’ connections with
Wahhabist groups in the Caucasus would revive the stigma. The Tsarnaevs' recruitment by US intelligence as penetration agents
against terrorist networks in southern Russia explains some otherwise
baffling features of the event:

1. An elite American college in Cambridge admitted younger brother
Dzhokhar and granted him a $2,500 scholarship, without subjecting him to
the exceptionally stiff standard conditions of admission. This may be
explained by his older brother Tamerlan demanding this privilege for his
kid brother in part payment for recruitment.

2. When in 2011, a “foreign government” (Russian intelligence) asked
the FBI to screen Tamerlan for suspected ties to Caucasian Wahhabist
cells during a period in which they had begun pledging allegiance to al
Qaeda, the agency, it was officially revealed, found nothing
incriminating against him and let him go after a short interview.

He was not placed under surveillance. Neither was there any attempt to
hide the fact that he paid a long visit to Russia last year and on his
return began promoting radical Islam on social media. Yet even after the Boston marathon bombings, when law enforcement
agencies, heavily reinforced by federal and state personnel, desperately
hunted the perpetrators, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was never mentioned as a
possible suspect

3. Friday, four days after the twin explosions at the marathon
finishing line, the FBI released footage of Suspect No. 1 in a black hat
and Suspect No. 2 in a white hat walking briskly away from the crime
scene, and appealed to the public to help the authorities identify the
pair.

We now know this was a charade. The authorities knew exactly who they
were. Suddenly, during the police pursuit of their getaway car from the
MIT campus on Friday, they were fully identified. The brother who was
killed in the chase was named Tamerlan, aged 26, and the one who
escaped, only to be hunted down Saturday night hiding in a boat, was
19-year old Dzhokhar.

Our intelligence sources say that we may never know more than we do
today about the Boston terrorist outrage which shook America – and most
strikingly, Washington - this week. We may not have the full story of
when and how the Chechen brothers were recruited by US intelligence as
penetration agents – any more than we have got to the bottom of tales of
other American double agents who turned coat and bit their recruiters.

Here is just a short list of some of the Chechen brothers’ two-faced predecessors:

In the 1980s, an Egyptian called Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed offered his
services as a spy to the CIA residence in Cairo. He was hired, even
though he was at the time the official interpreter of Ayman al-Zuwahiri,
then Osama bin Laden’s senior lieutenant and currently his successor. He accounted for this by posing as a defector. But then, he turned out
to be feeding al Qaeda US military secrets. Later, he was charged with
Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam.

On Dec. 30, 2009, the Jordanian physician Humam Khalil al-Balawi,
having gained the trust of US intelligence in Afghanistan as an agent
capable of penetrating al Qaeda’s top ranks, detonated a bomb at a
prearranged rendezvous in Kost, killing the four top CIA agents in the
country. Then, there was the French Muslim Mohamed Merah. He was recruited by
French intelligence to penetrate Islamist terror cells in at least eight
countries, including the Caucasus. At the end of last year, he revealed
his true spots in deadly attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and a
group of French military commandoes.

The debate has begun over the interrogation of the captured Boston
bomber Dzhokhar Tsarmayev when he is fit for questioning after surgery
for two bullet wounds and loss of blood. The first was inflicted during
the police chase in which his brother Tamerlan was killed. An ordinary suspect would be read his rights (Miranda) and be permitted
a lawyer. In his case, the “public safety exemption” option may be
invoked, permitting him to be questioned without those rights, provided
the interrogation is restricted to immediate public safety concerns.
President Barack Obama is also entitled to rule him an “enemy combatant”
and so refer him to a military tribunal and unrestricted grilling.

According to debkafile’s counter terror sources, four questions should top the interrogators' agenda:

a) At what date did the Tsarnaev brothers turn coat and decide to work for Caucasian Wahhabi networks?

b) Did they round up recruits for those networks in the United States -
particularly, among the Caucasian and Saudi communities?

c) What was the exact purpose of the Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath at MIT in Watertown?

d) Are any more terrorist attacks in the works in other American cities?

The younger brother, Jokhar’s entries on the micro-blogging site Twitter also
did not indicate anything especially suspicious, although some of his tweets may
sound enigmatic or even ominous if read with prior knowledge of the author’s
possible involvement in the Boston bombing (https://twitter.com/J_tsar).

On February 3, 2012,
the leader of the Caucasus Emirate Doku Umarov announced a moratorium on
attacks on civilians in Russia (see EDM,
February 9, 2012). Since then the moratorium has not been lifted. Umarov’s
reasoning for the halt on attacks against civilians in Russia sounded unusually
realpolitik as he said that Russian citizens were engaging in protest acts
against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government and the Emirate did not
want to stand in their way. He referred to the process of the struggle of Russian
civil society with the Kremlin as a “Chekist regime, of which they are the
hostages.” Doku Umarov’s predecessors, Aslan Maskhadov and Abdul-Khalim
Sadullayev, followed an analogous strategy (http://www.rferl.org/content/will_umarov_ban_on_terrorism_last/24472811.html).
If the moratorium on targeting civilians has not been lifted by the Caucasus
Emirate leadership, then it would be highly implausible that North Caucasian
militants who have avoided attacking Russian civilians would instead choose to
attack civilians in the United States.

The Tsarnaev brothers
spent only a limited time in Chechnya. Apparently, they briefly resided in the
republic just before the start of the second Russian-Chechen war, which began
in September 1999. It is plausible that the brothers may still have been
exposed to some conflict-related trauma resulting from the war, which uprooted
hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war-torn rebel republic. The
most plausible explanation for the April 15 Boston Marathon attack, given the
information publicly available currently, is that some personal events
triggered a violent response from the Tsarnaev brothers. However, many more
Chechen refugees live in European countries, than in the US. Many of them have
also suffered psychological trauma, but there have not been attacks involving
Chechens like this in Europe before.

Putin’s proposal may suggest it was a courtesy, but it also might indicate some
prior knowledge about the attack. So potentially one could conspiratorially theorize
that the Russian security services may have planned the attack in Boston in
such a way as to point to “Chechen terrorists”. However, even this elaborate
version has little, if any, supporting evidence, given the fact that the Tsarnaev
brothers moved to the US when they were extremely young and hardly could have been
recruited by the Russian security services.

As
we review what we know of the evidence of the attack and then weigh the
possible ties between the Tsarnaev brothers and Chechen militants in the North
Caucasus, the fact that North Caucasian terrorist number one in the eyes of the
Washington and Moscow—Doku Umarov, the head of the Caucasus Emirate—has
declared a ceasefire on civilian targets inside Russia, diminishes the
possibility that the Tsarnaev brothers could have been part of an elaborate
plan by Chechen terrorists to attack US civilians. Chechens have been fighting
Russians for over 200 hundred years and it makes more sense to limit their
targets to Russia proper than expand their activities to the United States.

It appears the Boston perpetrators, Tamerlan and his younger brother
Johar (Dzhohar) Tsarnaev, were homegrown, Internet empowered jihadists.
But Russia’s part in the deadly game remains murky. There is no solid
evidence linking the Kremlin to the marathon bombing but too many
questions remain unanswered to exclude Moscow’s involvement. Let us consider the relationship between Tamerlan and the post-Communist secret police.

In 2011, Moscow approached Washington with a warning that Tamerlan
Tsarnaev was involved in radical Islamist circles, most likely connected
to the Chechen insurrection. Accordingly, the FBI talked five times to
the young man and his relatives, but found nothing noteworthy. Now that
we know the Russian warning about the older brother was eerily prescient
we should ask on what basis the Federal Security Service of the Russian
Federation (FSB) singled out Tamerlan Tsarnaev for the FBI’s
investigation. But the Kremlin says it does not have anything specific
on the perpetrator and never did. Why did Russia bother us then with
investigating someone apparently lacking a track record of malfeasance?
Yet it did.

This can mean several things. First, it was a case of routine harassment of a Chechen émigré by the Russian authorities. In other
words, the FBI was used as a tool in a Muscovite racial profiling scheme
and influence operation abroad. The FBI should now analyze the
frequency and nature of Russia’s routine requests for a preventive talk
against Chechens resident in the United States to see just how routine the Kremlin’s request actually was in the Tsarnaev case.

Second, by pointing out Tamerlan, the Russian Foreign Intelligence
Service (SVR) was stupendously clairvoyant and channeled its fears
straight to our intelligence community to help protect America. That
broadminded generosity is highly unlikely, not to mention the apparent
Cassandric qualities of the chekists. If the Russians contacted us, they
had to have had an interest in it, other than the pure goodness of
Vladimir Putin’s heart.

Third, the post-Soviet secret services suspected that something was
afoot and wanted to emerge with clean hands in case anything did go
haywire. This is the “I-told-you-so” posture as in “I told you that the
Chechens are terrorists.”

Fourth, and most controversial, the Kremlin’s spooks singled out
Tamerlan because they had advance knowledge of the intent, if not the
operation itself, and, perhaps, were involved in it in some way. In what
way? That is the question. We can merely speculate. But his
relationship with the chekists appears to have been close indeed to
warrant such speculation.

In January 2012, Tamerlan Tsarnaev flew to the Russian Federation and
headed to Dagestan, where he remained, until July 2012. Let us
remember, Tamerlan was allegedly a person of interest to the FSB, which
prompted a probe by the FBI in Boston into the young man’s Islamist
tendencies. The standard operating procedure in Russia (and even in the
U.S.) would have been to detain the budding radical at the airport. At a
minimum, he should have been questioned. Deporting or jailing him would
be perfectly routine actions. Nothing of the sort happened. He was
permitted to go. Either this was a serious security lapse, or the FSB
was following him or otherwise kept him under surveillance. If the
latter, why does Moscow now deny it has any information about the
bomber?

And, why were the famously thuggish post-Communist secret services of
Dagestan not interested in Tamerlan at all? Their spokesman is on
record expressing lack of interest in the Tsarnaevs even in the wake of
the bombing. That is extraordinary. America’s leading specialist on the
non-Russian nationalities in the post-Soviet zone, Paul Goble, has
approvingly discussed the view of Ramaan Abdulatipov that Dagestan is a
failed state. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Glen Howard
has described the country where anarchy rules and assassinations occur
daily, usually with the connivance of the secret police. Tamerlan
Tsarnaev was suspected of being an Islamist radical by the FSB and he
went on vacation there?

In
Dagestan, according to his father, for half a year, Tamerlan did
nothing but sleep and visit relatives. Which ones? His uncle Muhamad
Suleimanov (pictured in uniform), who, according to Vasily Dazaev, was
(or is) involved with Dagestani security? Did Tamerlan meet with the
local Islamists? Or people who claimed to be Islamists?

And whom did Tamerlan meet in Austria when he visited there twice in
2007 and 2009? Allegedly, he competed in boxing in Insbruck and
Salzburg. Did he visit his relatives in Gratz? Who paid for the trips?
This is very expensive and unusual for a fresh emigrant to traipse
around the world with no worries. Austria is a hub of the Chechen émigré
activities second only to England. Where was Tamerlan when the émigré
leader Umar Israilov was assassinated by Moscow’s Chechen agents in
2009? All this needs investigating.

And why do his parents remain unmolested and safe in Dagestan? Both
parents were absent during the bombing in Boston. Coincidence? They were
happily tucked away in Makhachkala. Please remember: this is the
Caucasus. The Russians and their local allies go after anyone, and their
family with extreme prejudice who is suspected of radical Islamism.
Yet, the Tsarnaevs find this environment to be their safe haven.

Both parents of the Boston perpetrators have roots in the Caucasus.
Zubeidat Tsarnaev is an Avar of Dagestan, her husband Anzor a Chechen.
He is a boxing fanatic: first as a fighter, and then as a trainer and a
fan. This is an important point. I know that it sounds paranoid to
laymen but every counterintelligence officer should ask himself the
following question: With which club did Anzor Tsarnaev box? There were
two kinds in the Soviet Union: Spartak, which was run by the army, and
Dynamo, which was subordinated to the KGB and harks back to Felix
Dzerzhinsky’s Dinamo society. It is extremely relevant to the Russian
angle of the Boston bombing because, if in fact Anzor boxed for the KGB,
the secret service connections would endure well beyond his amateur
career and residency, anywhere. Such connections have served as an
informal safety net and transcend localities, translating rather
fluently throughout the entire post-Soviet zone. Once a chekist, always a
chekist. Ask Putin.

We would like some answers about the possible links between the
Tsarnaev family and the Soviet and post-Soviet security services. If we
can establish that such connections do exist, then we can prepare a more
detailed set of questions regarding their nature. The Tsarnaevs are
perhaps ordinary post-Soviets and there isn’t anything really to their
story beyond what the mainstream media has spun. However, until we get
some answers to the questions above, it is mischievous to exclude the
Kremlin angle from the Boston terrorist attack.

Evidence is mounting that the accused dead Boston Marathon bomber
Tamerlan Tsarnaev became a “radicalized” Muslim while participating in a
covert CIA program, run through the Republic of Georgia, to destabilize
Russia’s North Caucasus region. The ultimate goal of the CIA’s campaign
was for the Muslim inhabitants of the region to declare independence
from Moscow and tilt toward the U.S. Wahhabi Muslim-run governments of
Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Russia’s Izvestia is reporting that Tsarnaev attended seminars run by
the Caucasus Fund of Georgia, a group affiliated with the
neo-conservative think tank, the Jamestown Foundation, between January
and July 2012.

The U.S. media has been reporting that during this six
month time frame Tsarnaev was being radicalized by Dagestan radical imam
“Abu Dudzhan,” killed in a fight with Russian security last year.
However, in documents leaked by the Georgian Ministry of Internal
Affairs’s Counterintelligence Department, Tsarnaev is pinpointed as
being in Tbilisi taking part in “seminars” organized by the Caucasus
Fund, founded during the Georgian-South Ossetian war of 2008, a war
started when Georgian troops invaded the pro-Russian Republic of South
Ossetia during the Beijing Olympics. Georgia was supported by the United
States and Israel, including U.S. Special Forces advisers. The Georgian
intelligence documents indicate Tsarnaev attended the Jamestown
seminars in Tbilisi.

Tsarnaev also visited Dagestan in 2011. On December 16, 2011, WMR
reported on the CIA’s and George Soros’s operations in Georgia that
funded the Caucasus Fund, the Jamestown Foundation, and U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) activities. It should also be noted
that Tsarnaev’s Maryland-based uncle, Ruslan Tsarni (name changed from
Tsarnaev) was also contracted to USAID.

“The money from USAID for Russian dissidents is being funneled through
the Georgian Ministry of Education. The Georgian Minister of Education
Dmitry Shashkin also attended the Tbilisi ceremony (a World AIDS Day
ceremony also attended by U.S. ambassador to Georgia John Bass and
Georgia First Lady Sandra Roloefs, the Dutch wife of Georgian President
Mikheil Saakashvili), which provided cover for the covert aid program to
the Russian dissidents. USAID money was used to fund scholarships in
Georgia for exiled Chechen “students” who were being trained as CIA
agenst to interface with Chechen guerrilla forces and the Caucasus
Emirate terrorists of Doku Umarov.

Georgia has become the nexus for the U.S. aid to the Russian opposition
trying to unseat Putin. In March [2010], Georgia sponsored, with CIA,
Soros, and MI-6 funds, a conference titled ‘Hidden Nations, Enduring
Crimes: The Circassians and the People of the North Caucasus Between
Past and Future.’ Georgia and its CIA, Soros, and British intelligence
allies are funneling cash and other support for secessionism by ethnic
minorities in Russia, including Circassians, Chechens, Ingushetians,
Balkars, Kabardins, Abaza, Tatars, Talysh, and Kumyks.”

Note: the Talysh and Kumyks live primarily in Dagestan.

The conference, held on March 21, 2010, was organized by the Jamestown
Foundation and the International School of Caucasus Studies at Ilia
State University in Georgia. If Georgian counter-intelligence documents
had Tamerlan Tsarnaev attending Jamestown conferences in Tbilisi in
2011, could the Russian FSB have tracked him to the Jamestown Hidden
Nations seminar in March 2010? In any event, a year later the FSB
decided to contact the FBI about Tsarnaev’s ties to terrorists.

The first Russian request to the FBI came via the FBI’s Legal Attache’s
office at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in March 2011. It took the FBI
until June of 2011 to conclude that Tamerlan posed no terrorist threat
but it did add his name to the Treasury Enforcement Communications
System, or TECS, which monitors financial information such as bank
accounts held abroad and wire transfers. In September 2011, Russian
authorities, once again, alerted the U.S. of their suspicions about
Tamerlan. The second alert went to the CIA. The Russians were well aware
that the Hidden Nations seminar held a year earlier was a CIA-sponsored
event that was supported by the Saakashvili government in Georgia. In
their second communication with Washington, the Russians were likely
making the CIA aware that it was on to one of Langley’s assets.

At some point in time after the first Russian alert and either before or
after the second, the CIA entered Tamerlan’s name into the Terrorist
Identities Datamart Environment list (TIDE), a database with more than
750,000 entries that is maintained by the National Counterterrorism
Center in McLean, Virginia.

On March 31, 2010, shortly after the Hidden Nations conference in
Tbilisi, deadly mass casualty suicide bomb blasts in the Moscow Metro
system and in Dagestan, and Georgia’s Georgia’s launching of a
Russian-language TV channel targeting the north Caucasus and designed to
whip up anti-Russian feelings in the volatile region, WMR reported:

“The Jamestown Foundation is a long-standing front operation for the
CIA, it being founded, in part, by CIA director William Casey in 1984.
The organization was used as an employer for high-ranking Soviet bloc
defectors, including the Soviet Undersecretary General of the UN Arkady
Shevchenko and Romanian intelligence official Ion Pacepa. The Russian
FSB and the SVR foreign intelligence agencies have long suspected
Jamestown of helping to foment rebellions in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and
other north Caucasus republics. The March 21 Tbilisi conference on the
north Caucasus a few days before the Moscow train bombings has obviously
added to the suspicions of the FSB and SVR.

Jamestown’s board includes such Cold War era individuals as Marcia
Carlucci; wife of Frank Carlucci, the former CIA officer, Secretary of
Defense, and Chairman of The Carlyle Group [Frank Carlucci was also one
of those who requested the U.S. government to allow former Chechen
Republic 'Foreign Minister' Ilyas Akhmadov, accused by the Russians of
terrorist ties, to be granted political asylum in the U.S. after a veto
from the Homeland Security and Justice Departments], anti-Communist book
and magazine publisher Alfred Regnery; and Caspar Weinberger’s Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Kathleen Troia “KT”
McFarland. Also on the board is former Oklahoma GOP Governor Frank
Keating, the governor at the time of the 1995 Murrah Federal Building
bombing.

The Georgian International School for Caucasus Studies in a perfect
partner for Jamestown. Its current major project is designed to stir up
anti-Russian sentiments in the north Caucasus by creating such new
research programs as “Tsarist Russian policy and state-sponsored Soviet
ethnic policies conducted in the North Caucasus during the 19th and 20th
century.”

Cooperating with Jamestown in not only its north and south Caucasus
information operations, but also in Moldovan, Belarusian, Uighur, and
Uzbekistan affairs, is George Soros’s ubiquitous Open Society Institute,
another cipher for U.S. intelligence and global banking interests.
Soros’s Central Eurasia Project has sponsored a number of panels and
seminars with Jamestown. Soros and his NGO contrivances and constructs
provided the impetus for Saakashvili’s themed ‘Rose Revolution.’
Jamestown’s Monitor and the Soros-influenced Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty often quote from each others’ sources and reports.

On March 9, 2005, the Jamestown Foundation, Soros’s Open Society
Institute, and the Moldova Foundation sponsored a seminar in Washington
on the Moldovan elections. Among the advisory board members of the
Moldova Foundation are Bari-Bar Zion, CEO of A4E and Amin in Israel and a
former business adviser to the head of the Israel State Lottery, and
Sam Amadi, special adviser to the President of the Senate of Nigeria.
The Moldova Foundation receives support from Soros’s Open Society
Institute.”

Georgia was a major launching pad for anti-Russia operations by the CIA,
Mossad, and Britain’s MI-6. Not only did Georgian Imedi TV presented a
fake news report about a Russian invasion of Georgia — which also
suggested that Russian troops had killed Saakashvili — but Caucasus
Emirate terrorists were conducting a number of terrorist attacks inside
Russia, including a suicide bombings in Moscow and Dagestan, at the same
time NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was hosting
Saakashvili in Brussels.

The Russians indicated in their first communication with the FBI that
Tamerlan had changed drastically since 2010. That change came after the
Hidden Nations conference in Tbilisi. U.S. support for Chechen and North
Caucasus secession came as a result of a public statement on August
2008 by GOP presidential candidate John McCain that “after Russia
illegally recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia,
Western countries ought to think about the independence of the North
Caucasus and Chechnya.”

What does U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul know about Tamerlan Tsarneav’s activities in Russia’s North Caucasus?

Upon becoming President in 2009, Barack Obama adopted McCain’s proposal
and authorized CIA support for North Caucasus secessionists and
terrorists with money laundered through the USAID, the National
Endowment for Democracy, Soros’s Open Society Institute, Freedom House,
and the Jamestown Foundation. In January 2012, Obama appointed a Soros
activist and neocon, Michael McFaul of the right-wing Hoover Institution
at Stanford university, as U.S. ambassador to Moscow. McFaul
immediately threw open the doors of the U.S. embassy to a variety of
Russian dissidents, including secessionists from the North Caucasus,
some of whom were suspected by the Russian FSB of ties to Islamist
terrorists.

Nine thousand heavily armed police including SWAT teams were deployed
in a manhunt to capture a 19 year old student at U-Mass, after his
brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Marathon terror mastermind
was shot dead by police allegedly after a car chase and shoot out with
police. Prior to the conduct of a police investigation, the 19 year old
student has already been designated as “guilty”. The fundamental legal
principle of “innocence until proven guilty” has been scrapped. In the
words of President Obama (a graduate of Harvard Law School), the Boston
19 year old student is “guilty” of heinous crimes (without evidence
and prior to being charged in a court of law):

“Whatever hateful agenda drove these men [suspects] to such heinous acts
will not, cannot, prevail. Whatever they thought they could achieve,
they’ve already failed…. Why did young men who grew up and studied here
as part of our communities and our country resort to such violence?”
(emphasis added)

Coupled
with the alleged anthrax and ricin letters in Washington D.C. which
mysteriously surfaced in the immediate wake of the Boston tragedy, both
Washington and the media have underscored the Tsarnaev brothers tenuous
ties to Chechnya’s militant jihadist insurgency. According to the Wall Street Journal, quoting expert scholarly opinion:

”...the Chechen [family] background is maybe a part of what leads them [the two suspects] to do what they do,”
said Lorenzo Vidino, an expert on Chechen militants at the Center for
Security Studies in Zurich.” … A profile on the Russian
social-networking site Vkontakte that appears to belong to Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev includes a propaganda clip rallying jihadists to go to Syria to
fight alongside rebels there, citing sayings from the Prophet Muhammad.
[Amply documented, it just so happens that the jihadist foreign
fighters in Syria are recruited by the US and its allies] (Wall Street
Journal, op cit.)

What is implied is that even if the suspects
are not tied to a Muslim extremist network, their embedded cultural
heritage and Muslim “background” incites them –quite naturally– to
commit acts of violence. How does this concept –which routinely
associates Muslims with terrorism– repeated ad nauseam in the Western
news chain, affect the human mindset? While the identity and motives of the suspects
are currently being examined by police investigators, the Tsarnaev
brothers have already been categorized –without supporting evidence– as
“Radical Muslims”. Across the land, Muslims are being smeared and demonized. A new wave of Islamophobia has been set in motion.

The Creation of A New Legend: “The Chechen Connection”

A new legend is unfolding: “The Chechen Connection” is threatening America. Islamism homegrown in the Russian Federation is now being “exported to America”. Plastered on news tabloids across the United States, the April 15
Boston Marathon bombings on Patriots’ Day are relentlessly compared to
September 11, 2001. According to the Council of Foreign Relations:

Law enforcement agencies at all levels
have made advances in surveillance and policing since the September 11,
2001 attacks, but security risks persist. Many counterterrorism experts call for a renewed focus on the ability of the United States to weather and recover from such incidents… (emphasis added)

Is the Boston tragedy being used by Washington to usher in a new wave
of police state measures directed against different categories of
“domestic terrorists? Is this catastrophic event being applied to foster public reaction against Muslims? Is it being used to build acceptance of America’s holy crusade
–initiated during the Bush administration– directed against a number of
Muslim countries, which allegedly “harbor Islamic terrorists”?

According to the powerful Council of Foreign Relations (which exerts a
pervasive influence on both the White House and the State Department),
the Boston bombings once again “raise the specter of terrorism on U.S.
soil, highlighting the vulnerabilities of a free and open society”.
(Ibid)

Counter terrorism and Martial Law –implying the suspension of civil
liberties– rather than civilian law enforcement are the proposed
solutions. In the words of Secretary of State John Kerry, ‘‘I think it’s
fair to say this entire week we’ve been in pretty direct confrontation
with evil.’’

The unfolding mass media consensus (including that of Hollywood) is
that America is once again under attack. This time, however, the alleged
perpetrators are “Muslim terrorists” not from Afghanistan or Saudi
Arabia but from the Russian Federation:

“The Chechen Connection” has become embedded in a new media consensus. The American Homeland is potentially threatened by Muslim terrorists from the Russian Federation, who have links to Al Qaeda. There is also a foreign policy agenda behind
the bombings. The White House has hinted that if the “Chechen brothers”
had links to radical Islam, the administration “could expand
intelligence-gathering efforts overseas, as well as widen surveillance
and screening measures in the United States.”

Moreover, the new terrorist narrative now involves jihadists from the Russian Federation rather than from the Middle East. There are geopolitical implications. Will the
Chechen Connection be used by the administration as a renewed pretext
for pressuring Moscow? What kind of media propaganda is likely to
emerge?

Al Qaeda and the CIA

The American public is misled. The media reports carefully overlook
the historical origins of the Chechnya jihadist movement and its
pervasive links to US intelligence. The fact of the matter is that the jihadist movement is a creation of
US intelligence, which has also led to the development of “political
Islam”. While the role of the CIA in support of the Islamic jihad
(including most Al Qaeda affiliated organizations) is amply documented,
there is also evidence that the FBI has covertly equipped and incited
would be terrorists within the US. (See James Corbett, The Boston Bombings in Context: How the FBI Fosters, Funds and Equips American Terrorists, Global Research April 17, 2013)

The CIA’s agenda starting in the late 1970s was to recruit and train
jihadist “freedom fighters” (Mujahideen) to wage “a war of liberation”
directed against the pro-Soviet secular government of Afghanistan. The “Islamic Jihad” (or holy war against the Soviets) became an
integral part of the CIA’s intelligence ploy. It was supported by the
United States and Saudi Arabia, with a significant part of the funding
generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade:

“In March 1985, President Reagan signed
National Security Decision Directive 166 … [which] authorize[d]
stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen, and it made clear that
the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in
Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The
new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms
supplies — a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987 … as well as a
“ceaseless stream” of CIA and Pentagon specialists who travelled to the
secret headquarters of Pakistan’s ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi,
Pakistan. There, the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence
officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.”(Steve Coll, The
Washington Post, July 19, 1992.)

Mujahideen from a large number of Muslim countries were recruited by
the CIA. Jihadists from the Muslim republics (and autonomous regions) of
the Soviet Union were also recruited.(For further analysis see Michael
Chossudovsky, Al Qaeda and the “War on Terrorism”, Global Research, January 20, 2008)

Al Qaeda and the Chechnya Jihad

Chechnya is an autonomous region of the Russian Federation.

Among the recruits for specialized training in the early 1990s was the leader of the Chechnya rebellion Shamil Basayev who –in the immediate wake of the Cold War– led Chechnya’s first secessionist war against Russia. During his training in Afghanistan, Shamil Basayev linked up with
Saudi born veteran Mujahideen Commander “Al Khattab” who had fought as a
volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev’s return to
Grozny, Khattab was invited (early 1995) to set up an army base in
Chechnya for the training of Mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC,
Khattab’s posting to Chechnya had been “arranged through the
Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a
militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals
which channeled funds into Chechnya”.(BBC, 29 September 1999).

The evidence suggests that Shamil Basayev had links to US
intelligence as of the late 1980s. He was involved in the 1991 coup
d’Etat which led to the break-up of the Soviet Union. He was
subsequently involved in Chechnya’s unilateral declaration of
independence from the Russian Federation in November 1991. In 1992, he
led an insurgency against Armenian fighters in the enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh. He was also involved in Abkhazia, the largely Muslim
breakaway region of Georgia. The first Chechnya war (1994-1996) was waged in the immediate wake of
the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was part of a US covert operation
to destabilize the Russian Federation. The Second Chechnya war was waged
in 1999-2000. Broadly speaking the same guerrilla terrorist tactics applied in Afghanistan were implemented in Chechnya.

According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress’ Task
Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the insurgency in
Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah
International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. (Levon Sevunts, “Who’s
Calling The Shots? Chechen conflict finds Islamic roots in Afghanistan
and Pakistan”, The Gazette, Montreal, 26 October 1999.)

It’s obvious that the involvement of
Pakistan’s ISI in Chechnya “goes far beyond supplying the Chechens with
weapons and expertise: The ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are
actually calling the shots in this war.”(Ibid)

The ISI is in permanent liaison with the CIA. What this statement
signifies is that US intelligence using Pakistan’s Inter Services
Intelligence (ISI) as a go-between was calling the shots in the Chechnya
war. Russia’s main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan.
Despite Washington’s condemnation of “Islamic terrorism”, the
beneficiaries of the wars in Chechnya were the Anglo-American oil
conglomerates which were vying for complete control over oil resources
and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin. The two main Chechen rebel armies (which at the time were led by the
(late) Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab), estimated at 35,000
strong, were supported by CIA and its Pakistani counterpart the ISI,
which played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel
army:

“[In 1994] the Pakistani Inter
Services Intelligence [in liaison with the CIA] arranged for Basayev and
his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and
training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at
Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI
and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In July 1994,
upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev was transferred to
Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo training in advanced
guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the highest ranking
Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister of Defence
General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General Naserullah
Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting Islamic
causes, General Javed Ashraf (all now retired). High-level connections
soon proved very useful to Basayev.” (Ibid, emphasis added)

Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned
to lead the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen
war in 1995. His organization had also developed extensive links to
criminal syndicates in Moscow as well as ties to Albanian organized
crime and the KLA. (Vitaly Romanov and Viktor Yadukha, “Chechen Front
Moves To Kosovo”, Segodnia, Moscow, 23 Feb 2000)

The Chechen insurgency modeled on the CIA sponsored jihad in
Afghanistan has also served as a model for several US-NATO sponsored
military interventions, including Bosnia (1992-1995), Kosovo (1999),
Libya (2011), Syria (2011- ).

Chechen Rebels: US Covert Operation to Destabilize the Russian Federation

The 1994-1996 Chechen war, instigated by the main rebel movements
against Moscow, served to undermine secular state institutions. The
adoption of Islamic law in the largely secular Muslim societies of the
former Soviet Union served US strategic interests in the region. A parallel system of local government, controlled by the Islamic
militia, had been implanted in many localities in Chechnya. In some of
the small towns and villages, Islamic Sharia courts were established
under a reign of political terror.

Financial aid from Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf States to the rebel armies was conditional upon the installation of
the Sharia courts, despite strong opposition of the civilian
population. The Principal Judge and Ameer of the Sharia courts in
Chechnya was Sheikh Abu Umar, who “came to Chechnya in 1995 and joined
the ranks of the Mujahideen there under the leadership of
Ibn-ul-Khattab. … He set about teaching Islam with the correct Aqeedah
to the Chechen Mujahideen, many of whom held incorrect and distorted
beliefs about Islam.” (Global Muslim News, December 1997).

The Wahabi movement from Saudi Arabia was not only attempting to
overrun civilian State institutions in Dagestan and Chechnya, it was
also seeking to displace the traditional Sufi Muslim leaders. In fact,
the resistance to the Islamic rebels and foreign fighters in Dagestan
was based on the alliance of the (secular) local governments with the
Sufi sheiks:

“These [Wahabi] groups consist of a very
tiny but well-financed and well-armed minority. They propose with these
attacks the creation of terror in the hearts of the masses. … By
creating anarchy and lawlessness, these groups can enforce their own
harsh, intolerant brand of Islam. … Such groups do not represent the
common view of Islam, held by the vast majority of Muslims and Islamic
scholars, for whom Islam exemplifies the paragon of civilization and
perfected morality. They represent what is nothing less than a movement
to anarchy under an Islamic label. … Their intention is not so much to
create an Islamic state, but to create a state of confusion in which
they are able to thrive.( Mateen Siddiqui, “Differentiating Islam from
Militant ‘Islamists’” San Francisco Chronicle, 21 September 1999)

The second Chechnya war was launched by Vladimir Putin in 1999, with a
view to consolidating the role of the central government and defeating
the US sponsored Chechen terrorists against the Russian Federation.

“False Flags”

The
19 year old suspect is being used as a patsy. He was not even born in
Chechnya. While he and his brother had no connection to the jihadist
movement, the US media is carefully crafting a “Chechen Connection”
pointing to an inherent behavioral pattern associated with Muslims:

The brothers spent 10 years in the U.S.
during a formative period of their lives, exhibiting normal behavior for
first-generation immigrants, said Mitchell Silber, a former
intelligence official in the New York Police Department. “The question
is, what catalyzed the change? Was it Chechen nationalism? Did
it start with Chechen nationalism and somehow migrate to a pan-Islamist
jihad cause?” (Renewed Fears About Homegrown Terror Threat,” WSJ April 20, 2013)

There is evidence, however, from the testimony of family members that
the Tsarnaev brothers were on the radar of the FBI for several years
prior to the Boston bombings and were the object of recurrent threats
and harassment. Confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, the FBI had “interviewed” Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011. (Ibid)

What is abundantly clear is that the US government is not committed to fighting terrorists. Quite the opposite. US intelligence has been recruiting and grooming
terrorists for more than thirty years, while at same time upholding the
absurd notion that these terrorists, who are bona fide CIA “intelligence
assets”, constitute a threat to the American Homeland. These alleged
threats by “An Outside Enemy” are part of a propaganda ploy behind the
“Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT).

What is the Truth?

The development of an Islamist terrorist militia in different
countries around the World is part of an intricate US intelligence
project. While the Tsarnaev brothers are casually accused without evidence of
having links to Chechen terrorists, the important question is who is behind the Chechen terrorists? In an utterly twisted logic, the protagonists of the ‘Global War on
Terrorism” directed against Muslims are the de facto architects of
“Islamic terrorism.”

The “Global War on Terrorism” Mindset

The “war on terrorism” mindset builds a consensus: millions of
Americans are led to believe that a militarized police apparatus is
required to protect democracy. Little do they realize that the US
government is the main source of terrorism both nationally and
internationally. The corporate media is Washington’s propaganda arm, which consists in portraying Muslims as a threat to national security. At this juncture in our history, at the crossroads of global economic
and social crisis, the Boston bombings play a central role. They
justify the Homeland Security State.

The evolving US Police State is thereby upheld as a means to
protecting civil liberties. Under the guise of counter-terrorism,
extrajudicial killings, the suspension of habeas corpus and torture are
rightfully considered as a means to upholding the US Constitution. At the same time, the terrorists –created and supported by the CIA–
are used to participate in “False Flag” terrorist acts with a view to
justifying the conduct of a global military crusade against Muslim
countries, which so happen to be major oil producing economies.

“Massive Casualty Producing Events”

Former CENTCOM Commander, General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion
of Iraq in 2003, had outlined a scenario of what he described as “a
massive casualty producing event” on American soil, (a Second 9/11) .
Implied in General Franks statement was the notion and belief
that civilian deaths were necessary to raise awareness and muster
public support for the “global war on terrorism”.

“[A] terrorist, massive,
casualty-producing event [will occur] somewhere in the Western world –
it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country
in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event.”
(General Tommy Franks Interview, Cigar Aficionado, December 2003,
emphasis added)

While the Boston bombings are of an entirely different nature to the
“catastrophic event” alluded to by General Tommy Franks, the
administration appears, nonetheless, to be committed to the logic of
“militarizing our country” as a means to “protecting democracy.” The Boston events are already being used to galvanize public support
for an extended domestic based counter-terrorism apparatus. The latter
would be implemented alongside extrajudicial assassinations against
so-called “homegrown self radicalized terrorists”:

“U.S. counterterrorism policy has since 2001 focused largely on killing terrorists overseas or preventing them from getting into the U.S.
But the Boston bombings show how the diffusion of terrorist tactics
easily transcends borders. Countering small groups of individuals inside
the U.S. can be a bedeviling assignment. Bruce Riedel, director of the
Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan
Washington think tank, said the Boston attack was likely a harbinger.
“We are likely to see this as the future face of terrorist threats to
the United States,” he said, adding that the case of a small
number of radicalized participants who have lived in the U.S. and
execute a plot is “the counterterrorist community’s worst nightmare,
homegrown, self-radicalizing terrorism that learns its skill set off the
Internet.” (WSJ, April 20, op cit)

The “terrorist massive casualty-producing event” was upheld by General Franks as a crucial political turning point.

Do the Boston Bombings constitute a point of transition, a watershed
which ultimately contributes to the gradual suspension of
constitutional government?

Canadian boxer may have inspired Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Yet another name has surfaced as investigators attempt to determine
what motivated the suspected Boston Marathon bombers to wage a terrorist
attack two weeks ago. Authorities are still searching for answers in the wake of the
deadly terrorist attack in Boston that claimed three lives earlier this month,
and the only surviving suspect — 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev —
has reportedly stopped speaking to investigators. As questions
continue to go unanswered, though, independent researchers may have
stumbled upon the name of another person whose background may prove
helpful in piecing together what happened to inspire the April 15
bombing.

The extent that Dzhokhar’s 26-year-old brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev
played in the bombing may never be known since he was killed in a
gun battle with authorities amid a massive manhunt that brought
most of the Boston, Massachusetts region into lockdown mode. Now
investigators are digging for dirt on another man who may have had
a role in influencing the late Tsarnaev brother’s actions: a slain
23-year-old Canadian boxer named William Plotnikov.

Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper has called into question
Plotnikov, a Muslim convert who fled Toronto, Ontario, Canada in
2012 to fight against Russian security forces. According to the
paper, Plotnikov and the elder Tsarnaev brother connected over the
Internet during the years before and may have motivated one another
to use violence in getting their points across.

Details on Plotnikov’s life are presently scarce, but
investigators do believe that he spoke to Tamerlan Tsarnaev using
an online social networking site. Novaya Gazeta reveals that
Plotnikov briefly left the Toronto region in 2010 so he could study
Islam in the Dagestan region of Russia. While overseas, a red flag
was raised before Russian authorities who in turn ordered an
investigation into Plotnikov and a subsequent interrogation. During
that questioning, Plotnikov allegedly identified Tamerlan as
someone whom he communicated with on the Web.

Two years later Plotnikov joined a group of insurgents in the
Dagestan region, but an attempt to engage Russian security forces
proved unsuccessful and he died in battle with six other militants
that summer. Now a number of connections between the two slain
young Muslims are making investigators ask new questions. For one, the timing of Plotnikov’s passing raises concerns among
investigators. Plotnikov died in battle on July 14, 2012, and two
days later Tamerlan Tsarnaev quickly fled Russia for the United
States. Simon Shuster of TIME notes that Tsarnaev was in Dagestan
at the time of the killing, but fled two days later to Moscow, then
to the US.

“He did not even wait to pick up his new Russian passport,
which his parents claim to be the reason he came to Russia in the
first place,” writes Shuster. One source speaking to Novaya Gazeta says Tamerlan Tsarnaev may
have had to abort other plans after the untimely passing of an
insurgent who admitted to knowing him.

"It seems that Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to Dagestan with the
aim of joining the insurgents," a security source told the
paper. "It didn't work out. First you need to contact an
intermediary, then there is a period of 'quarantine' – before they
take someone, the insurgents check him out over several
months.”

TIME’s Shuster explains more of the similarities between the
suspect and his Canadian colleague:

“Both their families have roots in predominantly Muslim
regions of Russia — Plotnikov’s mother is Tatar; Tsarnaev’s parents
are from the North Caucasus. Both of them became avid amateur
boxers in North America after their families emigrated there. Both
of them embraced radical Islam while grasping around for an
identity in their adopted homes. Both of them came to Dagestan to
explore their faith. And both of them were in Dagestan between
January and July last year, when Plotnikov had already joined an
Islamist militant group and Tsarnaev was attending services at a
radical mosque.”

And while the parents of the Tsarnaev brothers insist their sons
are innocent, the father of Plotnikov has been perturbed by his own
offspring’s actions. Speaking to Canada’s National post last year,
Vitaly Plotnikov said his son converted to Islam in 2009 only to
die during an insurgency battle just three years later. “How can the mind of a person be changed in such a short
period of time?” the father asked. Tamerlan’s brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been formally charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and
has been transferred to Federal Medical Center, Devens outside of
Boston, Mass.

Astana, Kazakhstan - Following the terrorist attack on September 11,
2001, I received documents marked "SECRET" from the files of the FBI's
Washington field office. The information in those files will make you
sick. Click through to get a free download of the filmBush Family Fortunes, which contains the fascinating background to this story.

When the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, I grabbed those FBI
files – and a plane for Kazakhstan, bullying cameraman Rocco D into
joining me. [Rocco, no fool, won't let me print his full name.] After we
landed, word came that two Kazakh teens, friends of the
bombers, had been arrested by Boston police and charged with hiding
evidence of the bombers' guilt. Here in Astana, Kazakhstan's capital,
televisions everywhere run
endless loops of the bombs going off at the Boston Marathon, the
screams, the blood, the victims... and the questions.

And first question: How do a couple of wholesome Call-of-Duty-playing
American kids get the idea they should murder and mangle their
neighbors to avenge the Muslims of Chechnya—whom the victims probably
couldn't find on a map?

The second question: How did America's trillion-dollar intelligence
apparatchiks wave off warnings from Russia about one of the bomber's
connections to the Chechen militants?

The answer regarding the intelligence failure is, to paraphrase the famous journalist Yogi Berra: it's amazing what you don't see when you don't look.

And that's related to the how young Muslim-Americans came
to kill other young Americans over Chechnya. According to the secret
memo, long before the Boston bombing, even before the September 11
attack, the FBI shut down an investigation of a group that ran a summer camp in Florida for America's Muslim teenagers.

No, we shouldn't be spying on Islamic campers. However, besides the usual swimming and soccer, these
youngsters were encouraged to join the Chechen jihad. The kiddies were
treated to videos praising Chechen bombers (who seized a school and
hospital then killed their hostages). The group also produced an educational film praising, "that compassionate young man, Osama bin Laden".

Hey, it was a family affair. Camp Jihad was run by the World
Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), whose operation just outside Washington
DC was directed in the US by a man the FBI called "ABL" – Abdullah
Binladden, Osama's brother.

When the Kazakh friends of the Boston bombers were
arrested, I went
back to that "SECRET" memo. It fell into my hands in November 2001, just
two months after that "compassionate young man" Osama killed thousands
in my office building (I once worked at the World Trade Center). Why
would my own government spike an investigation that might have saved
lives in New York in 2001 [and in Boston in 2013]?

My producer at BBC Television called the FBI. They did not deny the
authenticity of the secret documents. Well, then, if the US government
has evidence someone may be illegally recruiting killers for Chechnya
(as well as the Bosnia war), why in the world would you shut down the investigation and hide the findings? The official answer was even more chilling than the secret memo itself. The FBI spokesman told us at BBC:

"There are lots of things only the intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know."

Well, what else are we not supposed to know? We got the answer on November 9, 2001, when I received a call at BBC's Newsnight
desk in London from a US intelligence agent via a "clean" phone. The
spook confirmed that, beginning as early as 1995, the CIA and other US spy agencies were told to stand down from investigating the bin Laden family in both the US and in France.

Several insiders repeated the same story: US agencies turned a blind
eye to the bin Laden-terrorist-Chechen-jihad connection out of fear of
exposing the US government's half-assed—and half-illegal—support for
these terrorists. Our government gave ABL a pass (and safe passage back to Saudi
Arabia) because Presidents Clinton and Bush were more than happy that
our Saudi allies were sending jihadis to Afghanistan, then, via WAMY,
helping Muslims to fight in Bosnia then, later, giving the Russians
grief in Chechnya.

The problem is that terrorists are like pigeons – they come home to
roost. As Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who
provided crucial help to our investigation, told me, "It would be
unseemly if [someone] were arrested by the FBI and word got back that
he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA… What we're talking about is
blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying
blow-back for intelligence officials."

It's utterly unlikely the young Boston bombers were on the CIA
payroll, but it's more than likely the elder brother's connections here
in Central Asia could be traced back to US-protected killers of years
past. The sleight-of-hand to keep public eyes off the US juicing Chechen
terror is almost fun to watch. There's surprisingly little official
scrutiny of the media's new heart-throb, Ruslan Tsarni, the bombers'
uncle. The Washington Post, praising Uncle Ruslan's "I LOVE AMERICA"
schtick, noted,

"[Ruslan's] performance will be sewn into the rotation of TV news
from here on out. Later, on MSNBC, Tom Ridge spoke highly of the message
of ‘promise and hope' sent by Tsarni."

I would venture to guess that this was not the first time Mr. Ridge,
first director of the US Department of Homeland Security, had heard
Ruslan's messages. Ruslan founded the Congress of Chechen International
Organizations and has lucrative work here in Kazakhstan as a USAID
contractor and oil industry lawyer.

There is zero—and I mean zero—evidence that Uncle Ruslan or the CIA
hired these two sad-ass kids in Boston to blow up their neighbors. The
point here is that the FBI is too concerned about making sure that "no
one else ought to know" about our government playing footsie with
terrorists—and too unconcerned about the blow-back that blows up in
Boston.

In the aftermath of massive, complicated crimes it’s not uncommon for
a bit of crucial information to be immediately put forward by police,
only to be contradicted later on. While it’s understandable that initial
leads and assertions might end up being wrong in a dynamic situation
like the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing,
wholesale contradictions can encourage skepticism of the motives of
those releasing inaccuracies — as with initial, false reports that Osama
bin Laden hid behind his wife
when U.S. forces shot him. Another effect of changing details can be to
encourage conspiracy theorists who latch onto inconsistencies, and to
undermine trust in authorities.

Now,
almost a week after the Tsarnaev brothers fought a rolling street
battle with dozens of heavily armed police officers, we learned
Wednesday night that they had only a single handgun, according to
sources who spoke with ABC News and the AP, something that directly contradicts what officials had previously said. Here are some of the biggest changes to facts released in this investigation:

Suspects’ arms – After the manhunt, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said the brothers were “heavily armed” and numerous reports detailed a fairly extensive arsenal. According to a New York Times report
from April 21 citing a law enforcement official, “The authorities found
an M-4 carbine rifle … two handguns and a BB gun.” Now unnamed sources
say there was only a single 9mm pistol between the two brothers. Indeed,
photos of the shootout suggest only one brother had a weapon.

Boat gunfight? – Police initially reported that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev fired on police when they found him hiding in a boat Friday night. “It was back and forth …
yes — he was firing,” Watertown Police Chief Ed Deveau told CNN
Saturday (though the FBI cautioned at the time that only federal
authorities had official information). In its definitive “tick tock”
of the events, the Washington Post reported that the suspect inside the
boat “was shooting back.” But later, the Washington Post and the AP reported yesterday that Tsarnaev was unarmed
when police found him after what what was described as a gunfight. As
it turns out, police may have been spooked by an errant shot, and fired
into the boat, but apparently zero shots came out.

7 -Eleven and the MIT officer
– Initial reports suggested the brothers tried to hold up a 7-Eleven,
and then killed an MIT officer who either responded to the robbery or
just happened to be in the area. But days later,
authorities revealed that the holdup was committed by different suspects
and the confusion was caused by the close proximity of the two events. It’s still unknown exactly why the brothers killed the police officer.

Carjacking – Some reports indicate that the person whom the brothers carjacked escaped while they inexplicably went into a store to buy snacks, while others say the brothers let the victim go because he wasn’t American. It’s also still unclear which brother stole the black SUV, and which drove the Honda that followed.

Trip to NYC -
What the suspects did after the bombing remains a mystery, but one
detail that emerged was that they were planning to head to New York City
— to party.
That’s what New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday. But
today, NBC News reports the brothers discussed trying to detonate a bomb
in Times Square, but that the plan was not well developed and “aspirational at most.”

Perimeter - As the New York Times reported
Wednesday, “Police officials initially said the boat was in the
backyard of a house just outside the perimeter of the area where
investigators had conducted door-to-door searches all day. But
Commissioner Davis, of the Boston police, said this week that the boat
had been inside the perimeter.”

Georgia is embroiled in scandal amid an investigation into suspicions
the country's previous government may have been involved in training
extremists. Media reports suggest the key suspect in the Boston bombings
participated in such training.

“It is possible that terrorists had been trained in Georgia,
but the investigation is underway. Let’s wait for its results. We
will get a lot of new information, maybe even some shocking
findings. There are suspicions that the authorities worked with
terrorists and militants. If this information is confirmed, this
will be shocking,” Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili
said on April 28.

The comment came in response to allegations in Russian media
that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the main suspect in the Boston Marathon
bombings, may have attended seminars allegedly sponsored by
Georgian security officials and a US-based foundation. Some of the
classes reportedly encouraged attendees to commit terrorist
acts.

Russian daily Izvestia and TV station Russia 1 recently revealed
that they obtained a report by Colonel Grigory Chanturia of the
Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ main security service.
According to the document, in summer 2012 the Kavkazsky Fund and
the Washington, DC-based Jamestown Foundation held events for young
residents of the North Caucasus. Tsarnaev, who stayed in Russia
from January to June 2012, allegedly attended some of these
events.

The Kavkazsky Fund has recruited North Caucasus residents for
work serving the interests of the US and Georgia, Russian media
reported. The Fund was set up in November 2008, shortly after the
Georgia-Ossetia conflict, to “control processes taking place in
the North Caucasus region,” according to Chanturia’s
report. The main aim of the Fund was allegedly to recruit young people in
the North Caucasus to heighten instability and extremism in
Russia’s southern region. Up to $2.5 million was allegedly
allocated to finance the Fund as of January 2013. “

To finance
the organization a monthly sum of about $20,000 was set up, ”
Chanturia said.

The Russian media also reported that the Kavkazsky Fund has had
close ties with the US Jamestown Foundation, an “independent,
nonpartisan organization” whose mission is to inform and
educate policymakers about events and trends of strategic
importance to the US. Its board of directors once included former
National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter Dr. Zbigniew
Brzezinski.

Today, the Fund features Brookings Institution Senior Fellow
Bruce Riedel, who retired in 2006 after 30 years at the CIA. Riedel
was a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East to four
Presidents in the staff of the National Security Council at the
White House, as well as a negotiator at several Arab-Israeli peace
summits including Camp David and Wye River.

In 2007, the Jamestown Foundation reportedly held a seminar
attended by militants loyal to Aslan Maskhadov, the leader of a
Chechen separatist movement and president of the self-proclaimed
‘Republic of Ichkeria.’ During the Second Chechen War in 1999, he
led a guerrilla resistance against the Russian army. He was killed
in a special operation by security services in 2005. In an interview with Voice of America, Jamestown denied that it
had trained Tsarnaev.

Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said it had no knowledge
of whether Tsarnaev had attended the seminars. “We don’t have
such information, we haven’t heard anything of the kind, we don’t
know,” Nino Giorgobiani, head of the Georgian Ministry of
Internal Affairs’ press service told RIA Novosti.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashavili said the previous
Georgian government never recruited or trained groups of Chechens
with the aim of infiltrating them into the Russian Federation. He
learned of Ivanishvili’s comments on the issue while on a working
visit to the US. Saakashvili said he was sure “America will not
take Ivanishvili’s words seriously,” Izvestiya daily quoted him
as saying.

In 2011, Russian authorities asked the FBI to question Tsarnaev,
an ethnic Chechen who had legal permanent resident status in the
US, over concerns he was linked to Islamic extremists. The FBI
confirmed that agents had interviewed him and other family members
that year following Russia's request, but “did not find any
terrorism activity, domestic or foreign.”

It was revealed that a misspelling of Tsarnaev’s name kept the
FBI in the dark about his early 2012 trip to Russia: “He went
over to Russia, but apparently, when he got on the Aeroflot plane,
they misspelled his name,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham
said while speaking with Fox earlier this week. “So it never
went into the system that he actually went to Russia.”

Last week, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving younger brother
implicated in the deadly Boston Marathon bombings, was charged with
using weapons of mass destruction to kill people, a federal crime
punishable by death, the Justice Department said. The twin bombings
near the finish line of the Boston Marathon last Monday killed
three people, including an 8-year-old boy, and wounded up to 264
people.

The 19-year-old Dzhokhar reportedly gave written testimony in a
hospital last Tuesday; his elder brother Tamerlan, 26, died on
April 19 after a fierce gun battle with police. The suspect told
interrogators that the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan spurred
him and his brother to carry out the deadly bombings, US officials
told the media. Dzhokhar, a naturalized US citizen of Chechen origin, further
took responsibility for his role in planting explosives near the
marathon finish line last week; he had previously maintained that
his brother Tamerlan was the mastermind of the terror plot.

Several friends of Tamerlan’s 24-year-old widow, Katherine
Russell, who he persuaded to convert from Christianity to Islam,
told National Public Radio that Tsarnaev often bullied and verbally
abused his wife, calling her a “slut” and throwing pieces of
furniture.

Even as the nation recovers from the shock of the Boston Marathon bombing, the US government is under pressure to intervene in Syria on behalf of the Tsarnaev brothers’ jihadistcompatriots. The drumbeat for intervention in Syria has been going on for many months, with the same neoconservatives who authored the Iraq war joining with “humanitarian” liberals to demand we “do something.” The latest claims of the use of sarin gas by the Assad regime are the occasion for a raising of the decibel level.

Under attack from Al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists for the last year, with car bomb attacks
on both civilian and military targets and the rebels in control of a
third of the country, Syria’s authoritarian government has responded
with lethal force – much like any government that found itself in a similar position would, including our own. Yet there is reason to doubt this latest claim: the “rebels” have staged a number of alleged “atrocities” committed by the secular authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad, but these have been consistentlydebunked – and the increasing dominance of jihadists in the Syrian opposition has made the Obama administration reluctant to get involved.

Now, however, we have a new accusation leveled not only by the rebels
and their American amen corner, but also by the British and Israeli
governments: in answer to an inquiry from Senator John “Boots On the
Ground” McCain, the administration accuses the Syrian regime of using sarin gas “on a small scale,” an assessment they make “with varying degrees of confidence.”

Varying from what to what? The letter is rife with equivocation and conjecture:

“Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence
assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For
example, the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how
the exposure occurred and in what conditions.”

Translation: no facts have been established. But that doesn’t stop
the Obama administration from making assumptions about who used sarin:

“We do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would
very likely have originated with the Assad regime. Thus far, we believe
that the Assad regime maintains custody of these weapons, and has
demonstrated a willingness to escalate its horrific use of violence
against the Syrian people.”

Yet there is no reason to assume any such “belief” about the Syrian
government’s possible use of sarin gas. That regime is deteriorating by
the day, as fast as their control over vast swathes of Syrian territory is disappearing. It is just as reasonable (i.e. not very) to assume the rebels are responsible: after all, they have plenty of state-backed sponsors (the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Qatar) who would be more than ready to provide it. And, of course, the jihadists who are the backbone of the rebel army, wouldn’t hesitate to deploy it.

US intervention in Syria’s civil war – which pits Bad Guys against
Even Badder Guys – will be justified by the alleged use of “weapons of
mass destruction” by Damascus, and the cry will go up: “He’s killing his
own people!” If all this has a familiar ring to it, then you’ll recall
the same accusations, including allegations of poison gas deployment,
were made against Iraq: this was the justification for the invasion, conquest, and subsequent occupation of that country, a project that cost trillions and is now regarded as one of the worst military disasters in our history. (Never mind that Saddam’s use of poison gas on the Kurds occurred when we were his ally.) That the War Party is running this one up the flagpole defies belief – but, hey, in Bizarro World, where up is down and unwarranted assumptions are “very likely,” anything is possible.

What’s really going on here? After all, the “arguments” made by the
interventionists just don’t add up. Take Jamie Kirchick, who works for
an outfit called the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies
(formerly known as “Emet“), writing in the New York Daily News:

“Of all the regimes that have experienced turmoil as a result of
the Arab Spring, Syria’s is the only one that has been consistently
opposed to American interests. It is the only Arab ally of Iran, a major
supplier of weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah, a perpetual violator of
Lebanese sovereignty and a transit hub for jihadists on their way to
Iraq.”

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Syria proactively offered
to aid – and did aid – in the round up of Al Qaeda cadre, and, indeed,
we renditioned several
to Assad’s torture chambers for the kind of interrogation not even our
water-boarding CIA was prepared to conduct. As per usual with Kirchick,
he confuses American interests with Israeli interests, citing Syrian
support of Hamas and Hezbollah as further proof of Assad’s crimes. While
both organizations are indeed terrorist groups which target civilians –
as were their Israeli counterparts, the Irgun and Haganah – their target is Israel, not the United States.

The kicker is when Kirchick kvetches that Syria is “a transit hub for
jihadists on their way to Iraq.” He can’t be unaware that these very same jihadists stand at the head of the Syrian rebel army. The sheer sloppiness is breathtaking: war-mongering hacks like Kirchick – who once proposed
setting up a “gay brigade” to go fight in Iraq (without saying whether
he’d join up himself!) – are feeling so confident they aren’t even
bothering to make a credible case.

Similarly, one would think the numerous hoaxes – such as trying
to pass off photos of atrocities occurring in Iraq as “evidence” of
mass killings by the Syrian government – attempted by Syrian rebel
propagandists would induce skepticism at these new accusations. But no –
not in Bizarro World, where a history of outright lies naturally causes
one to trust the pronouncements coming out of Washington and its allies
even more.

Britain and France were demanding a UN investigation even before this
latest release of “intelligence” by an Israeli general at a security
conference, who claims to have “proof”
of the sarin gas charge. Now the Israelis have added their two cents:
however, in a phone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, John Kerry was unable to get him to confirm this latest revelation.

The British also claim to have definitive evidence, but the Wall Street Journalreports
some officials are skeptical: the Brits tout their test results, but US
intelligence sources are saying “the samples may have been tainted by
rebels who want to draw the West into the conflict on their side.
Likewise, they said the detection of chemical agents doesn’t necessarily
mean they were used in an attack by the Syrian regime.”

How many times do we have to be lied into war by some murky “rebel” group – and their foreign backers – looking for us to do their fighting for them?

If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, laying there in the hospital, could only hear
the war cries of our pundit-shrikes grow louder and more insistent, he
would crack a smile. After all, one of his causes is the Syrian rebel
movement: as this
Yahoo article points out, on his Vokontakte page (the Russian
Facebook), Dzhokhar “expresses sympathy for rebel fighters in Syria and
elsewhere:

“One video bears the Russian title ‘For those who have a heart,’
showing people being brutalized by uniformed men in a country the video
identifies as Syria. ‘They are killing your brothers and sisters without
any reason,’ the Russian subtitles of the video read. ‘Simply because
they say our Lord is Allah.’”

Indeed, if we do intervene, Dzhokhar could even imagine his horrific
crime is a great success – because, after all, isn’t the Great Satan on
the verge of taking up the cause of jihad in Syria? One might even
conjecture that, from a certain vantage point, this development is a
response to the Boston bombing, a message to jihadists both here and
abroad: Don’t bomb us – because we’re here to help!

Boston Marathon Bombing happened on Same Day as “Controlled Explosion” Drill by Boston Bomb Squad

What’s not yet being reported by the mainstream media is that a
“controlled explosion” was under way on the same day as the marathon
explosion. As the Boston Globe tweeted today, “Officials: There will be a controlled explosion opposite the library within one minute as part of bomb squad activities.”

Some people believe this explosion might have been part of the
demolition of another bomb. It seems unlikely, however, that a bomb at
the library, one mile away, could be so quickly located and rigged to be
exploded by the bomb squad in less than one hour following the initial explosions at the marathon. Bloomberg news is now saying, “This is very likely a terrorist attack.”

The question is: Who are the terrorists? It’s far too early to take
an informed guess on all this. However, it is indisputable that the FBI
is actively engaged in carrying out bomb plots in the United States, then halting them at the last minute to “catch the terrorists.” This fact has been covered by the New York Times, among other publications.

Keep in mind I am in no way blaming the FBI for this. Most men and
women who work with the FBI are upstanding citizens who would be
appalled at such acts. But it is theoretically possible that one of the
FBI’s many “terror plots” went too far and turned into a live bomb instead of a dud followed by an arrest for “domestic terrorism.”

For the record, the explosions seemed relatively small for a false flag, and most false flags target children in order to
maximize the emotional leverage after the event. That these explosions
did not target children is yet more evidence that it may not have been a
false flag at all. Either way, terrorism always works in the favor of the state.
It makes presidents look presidential, and it gives the government an
excuse to crack down on civil liberties all across the country. Be wary of who ultimately gets blamed for this, especially if it’s a veteran or patriot.

"Contractors" at Boston Marathon Stood Near Bomb, Left Before Detonation

Image: An already widely distributed photo showing the
contractor-types on the bottom left, just left of where the bomb was
placed and detonated. The men are wearing matching, unmarked uniforms,
large black bags, and appear to be waiting, separately, and "behind" the
rest of the crowd. In the upper left corner, a wooden structure forming
one half of a temporary photography "bridge" over the finish line can
be seen and serves as a useful reference when establishing the
contractor-types' position in other photos.

What appear to be private contractors, wearing unmarked, matching
uniforms and operating an unmarked SUV affixed with communication
equipment near the finish line of the Boston Marathon shortly after the
bomb blasts - can be seen beforehand, standing and waiting just meters
away from where the first bomb was detonated. The contractor-types had
moved away from the bomb's location before it detonated, and could be
seen just across the street using communication equipment and waiting
for similar dressed and equipped individuals to show up after the
blasts.

The men, numbering between 6-8 then begin tearing up the skirting around
temporary bleachers erected for the event, opposite the explosion,
before taping it off. Then, what appears to be an FBI bomb squad truck
pulls up directly behind the contractor-types' SUV, with a woman clearly
wearing the letters F.B.I. on her tactical vest emerging and speaking
with the contractor-types. Together they disappear from the scene,
leaving their vehicles behind.

It should be noted, that with the exception of the contractor-types, all
other responders at the scene, including the FBI agent, can be clearly
identified, from police to the fire department, to medics and even
individuals wearing vests with "B.A.A. Physician" written on them. It
should also be noted that no other uniformed individuals can be seen
standing near the bomb site aside from the contractor-types.

These men were unidentified, professional contractors apparently
augmenting public servants at the Boston Marathon, present before and
after the bomb blasts in the direct vicinity of the incident. After the
blasts, whether it was their intended function or not, they appeared to
be searching for something under the bleachers before being joined by
what appears to be the FBI bomb squad. The FBI and the city of Boston
has so far categorically failed to provide any information on these
highly suspicious individuals.

Questions That Must be Answered

Several questions must be answered by the FBI, leading the investigation
on behalf of we, the American people. The first question is who these
men were, with large, black bags in the direct vicinity of where a bomb
would detonate, moving away before the blast, and appearing directly
across the road afterward. Who hired them and what was their function?
Why were they moving amongst the crowd in a semi-covert fashion when all
other public servants present were wearing proper uniforms and clearly
identified? Did police, firefighters, event organizers, and medics know
these men were present and what they were doing?

Why did it appear that the FBI was fully aware of their presence, and in
fact working with them, specifically with what looks like a bomb squad
unit? Were these contractors specialists in explosives, and if so, what
is the significance that at least two of them were spotted just meters
from where the blast occurred?

Why These Questions Demand Answers

The checkered, frightening history (see: FBI's History of Handing "Terror Suspects" Live Explosives)
of the FBI's involvement in fomenting false terror attacks, and even
presiding over attacks that succeeded in maiming and killing innocent
people, should call into question their presence or involvement at any
public event, especially when seen associating with unidentified,
semi-clandestine organizations that appear to be private contractors.

Private
contractors as well, do not answer or work for the public, but rather
the highest bidder. Private contractors, most notably Blackwater and its
various incarnations have operated both domestically and abroad,
committing obscene crimes and atrocities
with seemingly absolute impunity. The term "defense contractor" is in
fact a euphemism for mercenary, and has no place in a civilized,
democratic world, no matter what their alleged mission statement may
claim.

That both of these nefarious entities were present and cooperating in
the direct vicinity of the Boston bombings, with at least two
contractors standing just meters away from where the bomb actually went
off, raises a number of possibilities and concerns. A drill may have
been being conducted, though the FBI and city officials have denied
this. Or, a threat may have been communicated to event organizers ahead
of time, which prompted the inclusion of "auxiliary" security, though
again, both the FBI and the city of Boston deny receiving any
information prior to the bombings. Whichever contracting firm this may
have been, may just have wanted to swindle Boston's taxpayers for an
easy payday, and coincidentally found itself in the middle of
extraordinary circumstances.

However, alarming suspicion is raised when the FBI makes no mention of
an organization it was clearly coordinating with, particularly in terms
of bombs and explosives before and after the incident, considering the
nature of the attack. When an already dubious organization attempts to
obfuscate the facts of any given event, it is the right and
responsibility of legitimate law enforcement, public representatives and
the citizenry itself to demand and get answers. If we are not
persistent, with the FBI's bizarre behavior over the past few days,
including inexplicably cancelled and suspiciously rushed press
conferences, and now what appears to be a Hollywood ending for the case,
we may never get those answers.

Ruslan Tsarni was married to CIA officer's daughter and even shared a home with the agent

An uncle of the Boston bombers was previously married to a CIA officer's daughter for three years, it emerged today. Ruslan
Tsarni, who publicly denounced his two terrorist nephews' actions and
called them 'Losers', even lived with his father-in-law agent Graham
Fuller in his Maryland home for a year.

Mr Fuller was forced to explain the relationship today as news of the family link emerged online. He told Al-Monitor that his daughter,
Samantha, was married to Ruslan, whose surname was then Tsarnaev, for
three to four years in the 1990s. The couple divorced in 1999 more than ten years after he left the agency in 1987.

'Samantha
was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years, and they lived
in Bishkek for one year where Samantha was working for Price Waterhouse
on privatization projects,' Mr Fuller said. 'They also lived in our house in [Maryland] for a year or so and they were divorced in 1999, I believe.

'I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987 and had moved on to working as a senior political scientist for RAND.'

He
said his son-in-law showed no interest in the agency or politics but
spoke generally about his family in Chechnya. He said any attempts to
portray the relationship as a link between the security agency and the
two terrorists was 'absurd'.

'Like
all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land, but I
saw no particular involvement in politics,' Fuller told Al-Monitor. 'I
doubt he even had much to say of intelligence value other than talking
about his own family’s sad tale of deportation from Chechnya by Stalin
to Central Asia. Every Chechen family has such stories.'

Fuller visited his daughter and her
husband in Bishek, as a former Russian history graduate himself
interested in 'Soviet minorities'. He
said he may have met the terror suspects' father, Aznor, there once and
his daughter knew the Tsarnaev family when Tamerlan was a toddler and
before his younger brother was born. 'I for one was astonished at the events, and to find myself at two degrees of separation from them,' he added.

Ruslan
Tsarni, who lives in Montgomery Village, Maryland, was thrust into the
spotlight as the names of his two nephews emerged in connection to the
Boston terror attack. He stood on his driveway and attacked the two men calling them 'Losers'. He
has since reported a rift between his family and that of his brother
Aznor's and said his older nephew Tamerlan had become increasingly
extreme in his religious views.

He
said he last spoke to him in 2009 when he declared he was dropping out
of school to do 'God's business' and Tsarni was concerned at his
religious fervor. '[The
bombing] has nothing to do with Chechen … He put a shame on our family,
he put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity,' he told broadcasters
in the aftermath of the bombings.

He
also told reporters that Tamerlan had a friend called Misha who
'brainwashed' him. 'This person just took his brain. He just brainwashed
him completely,' he said. FBI agents today said they had tracked down
Misha and believed he had no link to the terror attacks.

In the days of hysteria immediately following the Boston bombing, an
unlikely media darling emerged. Ruslan Tsarni, the alleged bombers’
uncle, known to the press as “Uncle Ruslan,” gained notoriety for the ferocity
with which he denounced his own nephews and their alleged Islamic
radicalism. It isn’t hard to see why the press focused so closely on
“Uncle
Ruslan.” He said precisely what the so-called “authorities” wanted to
hear about the suspects in precisely the way they wanted to hear it.
Compare this to the coverage of the boys’ mother in the mainstream
media. After revealing the FBI’s connection to the Tsarnaev brothers—causing the Bureau to reluctantly confirm
that they had investigated Tamerlan in the past—she has been
alternatively smeared and dismissed by those same media outlets which
have refused to delve into the FBI connection.

But
even more interesting than the sudden popularity of “Uncle Ruslan” is
his background and ties to other organizations. In an official SEC filing
from 2005 it was revealed that Ruslan Tsarni had worked as a consultant
for USAID, ostensibly an independent federal agency which is little
more than an adjunct of the US State Department and is a known front
for deep cover CIA agents in various geostrategic corners of the globe.
At the same time in the mid-1990s, Tsarni incorporated a company called
the “Congress of Chechen International Organizations” which recently unearthed documents show was providing material support to Chechen terrorists, including Sheikh Fathi, who, according
to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, was a “military commander in the
violent jihadist movement in Chechnya” and a “preacher of violent
jihad.”

As investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker has demonstrated,
the address for the Congress of Chechen International Organizations
just happened to be the home address of Graham E. Fuller, formerly Vice
Chairman of the Reagan-era CIA’s National Intelligence Council. The
relationship between Ruslan and this former top CIA official was not a
loose one. Tsarni married Fuller’s daughter in the mid-1990s and lived
in Fuller’s home for some time, basing his terror-supporting operation
under Fuller’s own roof. Fuller himself has an interesting background that includes his two
decade stint with the Central Intelligence Agency. During that time he
served as National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia.
One of his most notorious acts during that time was penning a memo that,
according to the New York Times, later became the basis for the Iran-Contra scandal.

In addition, Fuller has long made the argument that Islam is a
potentially useful geopolitical tool for the United States to manipulate
for their own ends. He has been quoted
as saying, “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping
them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan
against [the Russians]. The same doctrines can still be used to
destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the
Chinese influence in Central Asia.”

Fuller’s ties also extend to the network of Imam Fethullah Gulen,
an Islamic preacher who was run out of Turkey for allegations of
conspiracy to overthrow the secular government, Gulen ended up in
Pennsylvania where he now oversees a vast organization known as the
Gulen Movement which has over $20 billion at its disposal for setting up
Islamic schools in over 100 countries. Being a wanted man by the Turkish government, Gulen did not just
waltz into the US and gain immediate residency. Instead, he fought a
protracted legal battle that included reference letters from well-connected political figures, including none other than Graham Fuller. Since the details of Fuller’s connection to the Boston bombing
suspects’ uncle emerged, Fuller has admitted the connection but
dismissed the suggestion that there is any link between the CIA and the
Boston bombing case as “absurd.” Late last month, it was revealed that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had attended a workshop last year sponsored by the CIA-linked Jamestown Foundation.

Late last month, Sibel Edmonds appeared on The Lew Rockwell Show to discuss the “coincidence” of Fuller’s connection to this case.

A narrative has begun to emerge from the background noise of the
Boston bombing story that paints a very different picture from what we
have been told. We have the uncle of the bombing suspects emerging as a
media darling for his denunciation of the brothers, who just so happens
to have worked with USAID and was living and working at the home of a
top CIA official who has actually advocated “guiding the evolution of
Islam” to destabilize Russia and China in Central Asia. Now we have
several of the pieces of the puzzle that Edmonds’ predicted in the past
few weeks falling into place: that the bombers were likely being run by
the CIA; that the event would bring focus
on radical terrorism who have hitherto been painted as “freedom
fighting allies” of the US; and that the case may be used as leverage to
make new inroads on the Syria standoff between Washington and Moscow.

And
several of the pieces of this puzzle revolve around Graham E.
Fuller, former National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South
Asia, a proponent of political Islam, an inspiration for the Iran-Contra
affair, a character reference for CIA darling Fethullah Gulen, a former
RAND analyst, and the father-in-law of the Boston bombers’ uncle. So
what else is there to be uncovered regarding Fuller’s background
and activities? For the answer to this, you will have to stay tuned to
alternative researchers like Edmonds and Hopsicker, and tune out of the
corporate media which hasn’t dared to even broach the question.

The
uncle of the two men who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon, who
struck the only grace note in an otherwise horrific week, worked as a
“consultant” for the Agency for International Development (USAID) a U.S.
Government Agency often used for cover by agents of the CIA, in the
former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan during the “Wild West” days of the
early 1990’s, when anything that wasn’t nailed down in that country was
up for grabs.

“Uncle
Ruslan” Tsarni of Montgomery Village Md., whose name was the top
trending topic worldwide on Twitter last Friday for his plain-spoken
condemnation of his two nephews, has had a checkered business career,
that began well before he graduated (as Ruslan Z Tsarnaev) from Duke Law
School in 1998.Tsarni,
a well-connected oil executive, is currently involved in an
international criminal investigation into a Kazakh billionaire
banker-turned-fugitive alleged to have absconded with $6 billion from
Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank.

The story begins with The London Sunday Times on May 8, 2011,
which reported the sale of the personal home of England’s Prince Andrew
to billionaire Kazakh Oligarch Timur Kulibayev, who “controls that
country’s oil industry and happens to be married to the daughter of its
autocratic President Nursultan Nazarbayev.”What does that have to do with "Uncle Ruslan?" Let's take a look.

"Can't tell your Oligarchs without a scorecard"

Headlined "Prince's home in 'laundered cash' inquiry," the story raised several red flags. One
was that the President-for-Life’s son-in-law had paid $5 million over
the asking price to purchase Prince Andrew’s home, which raised
eyebrows.

Red
flags and eyebrows were raised still further, in these times of global
near-depression, at the conspicuous oligarchic consumption (read: bad
taste) exhibited when the Kazakh President-for-Life’s daughter-for-life Goga Ashkenazi celebrated her 30th birthday with a lavish party before the scandal hit.

Goga, who made her appearance in a Swarovski crystal-encrusted, backless lace dress, attended by Prince-for-Life Andrew, was entertained by fire-eaters, peacock-feathered stilt-walkers, and a girl swinging on a trapeze pouring vodka into ice sculptures shaped like naked male and female torsos.There was even a woman suspended in a bird cage (true) who was there to direct guests to strategically-placed vomitoriums (alas, not true) strewn about the mansion grounds.

Enter "Uncle Ruslan"

But
the biggest red flag, the one pertinent to murder in Boston, was
Oligarch Kukibayev's use of money laundered through a network of
offshore companies to attempt to hide his purchase of Prince Andrew's
crib, which emerged during a legal battle between another billionaire
Kazakh oligarch, Mukhtar Ablyazov, and BTA Bank, from which Kazakhstan
claims Ablyazov embezzled a very cool $6 billion dollars.And this is where “Uncle Ruslan” Tsarni comes in.

The purchase of the Prince's estate was put together, according to prosecutors
in Italy and Switzerland, by a group of oil executives who comprise “a
network of personal and business relationships” allegedly used for
“international corruption," reported The London Telegraph.

Tsarni, called “a
US lawyer who has had dealings in Kazakh business affairs,” by the
Sunday Times, clearly appears to be a member of that network. The
Sunday Times reported, “A statement by Ruslan Zaindi Tsarni was given
in the High Court in December, claiming that Kulibayev bought
Sunninghill and properties in Mayfair with $96 million derived from a
complex series of deals intended to disguise money laundering.”

“Tsarni
alleged that the money came from the takeover of a western company,
which had been used as a front to obtain oil contracts from the Kazakh
state.”

A Big Big Sky's the Limit

The
“western company” used to launder the money which the Sunday Times
referred to is Big Sky Energy Corporation, where Ruslan Tsarni was a top
executive. Big Sky, which used to be known as China Energy Ventures Corp, is a now-bankrupt US oil company run by S.A. (Al) Sehsuvaroglu, a long-time executive of Halliburton, which had oil leases in Kakakhstan’s Caspian Basin.Tsarni was Big Sky’s Corporate Secretary and Vice President for Business Development. He joined Big Sky in 2005. A press release announcing his appointment stated:

“Mr.
Ruslan Tsarni, a U.S. citizen, has over 10 years of professional
experience in oil and gas legislation and corporate law. Previously, Mr.
Tsarni served as Corporate Counsel of Nelson Resources Limited Group as
well as Managing Director of several of its operating subsidiaries.
“From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Tsarni worked as Head of Legal Affairs of Golden
Eagle Partners LLC.

Big Sky was on somebody's watch list

"From
1994 to 1996, Mr. Tsarni served as a consultant contracted by USAID for
projects aimed to develop securities markets in Central Asia, where he
trained corporate governance and corporate finance principals in state
and private companies.”According
to a source who worked for many years as a journalist at Platts Oilgram
News, a respected oil industry trade publication, good corporate
governance was not a Big Sky priority.“Nelson,
Big Sky, Ablyazov, Kulibayev and the rest were all on my watch list for
intelligence connections and pay-offs of various kinds at Platts,”
stated the source, who requested anonymity. The news corroborates other
reports beginning to emerge about the family and its abundant
connections.

A "connected" family?

Before
the Tsarnaev family moved to the United States a decade ago, they lived
in the northern Kyrgyz town of Tokmok, near the border with Kazakhstan,
which is home of the country's largest ethnic Chechen community. The
day after the massive manhunt in the Boston area that led to the death
of Tamerlan and the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Radio Free Europe and Kyrgyz Service correspondent Timur Toktonaliev traveled to Tokmok.

From there, he reported that the extended Tsarnaev family is well-known there, even beyond their local community. “It
is not known if there was anything more than a personal connection,”
the story reported, “but organized crime boss Aziz Batukaev, who is also
an ethnic Chechen, lived next door to the Tsarnaevs. Batukaev grew up
and lived in Tokmok, but is now in Chechnya.

Halliburton
executives, suspected CIA assets, Chechnyan crime bosses, oligarchs
stealing billions from banks and laundering money with seeming
impunity, fire-eaters, peacock-feathered stilt-walkers, and a girl
swinging on a trapeze pouring vodka into ice sculptures shaped like
naked male and female torsos… If there hadn't been two of them, the
investigation would already be pointing to a single misfit, a lone nut
bomber.

The
Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan, 26 years old, and 19-year-old Jokhar, have been
accused of carrying out the bombing at the Boston Marathon on Monday, April 15.
Tamerlan has died from injuries sustained from a shootout with police on
Friday, April 19. While, as of the publication of this article, the younger brother,
Jokhar, is still at large.

The
Tsarnaev family used to reside in Kyrgyzstan. They probably ended up in
Kyrgyzstan after mass deportation of Chechens from the North Caucasus in 1944. Today,
there are approximately 20,000 ethnic Chechens still residing in Kyrgyzstan.
Shortly before the onset of the second Russian-Chechen war in September 1999,
the Tsarnaev family moved to their homeland in Chechnya. After the war began in
1999, they moved to Dagestan, having apparently become refugees.

The fact that
they resided in Makhachkala and not in Khasavyurt, as most other ethnic Chechens
in the republic, indicates that they had the financial means to live in the
capital of Dagestan, which is quite expensive. They also had relatives in the
city and were able to send their children to one of the best schools in Makhachkala,
School #1. The younger brother, Jokhar
Tsarnaev, went to this school only for one year where he completed the first
grade (http://www.zman.com/news/2013/04/19/149396.html).

Subsequently,
the family was divided as the father, Anzor, stayed in Makhachkala, while the
rest of the family started looking for ways to emigrate from the North
Caucasus. His mother, Zubeidat, had four children: two sons
and two daughters, who managed to emigrate legally to the United States. Once
in the US, she received permanent residence for herself and her children. The
mother’s first name, Zubeidat, suggests she was of Dagestani origin and that is
probably why the family moved to Dagestan in the first place.

Having
settled in the Boston area, the Tsarnaevs tried to adapt to their new home. The
elder brother, Tamerlan, received a degree in engineering and was a boxer, who
reportedly dreamed of competing in sporting events under the US flag. Tamerlan
received US resident status in 2007 (http://lenta.ru/news/2013/04/19/anzor/).

The second
brother, 19-year-old Jokhar, had only just begun to attend college. On his
Internet page of the online social network VK.com, he described his views and also
listed several groups of which he was a member. Jokhar was a member of three
Muslim groups, but none of the groups could be described as terrorist or
jihadist; they rather provided information about Islam. One of the groups, for
instance, Salamword collected funds for people suffering with cancer. The
second group, Islam.Muslims.Islam, simply spread photographs of mosques from
around the world. The third group, called Lya ‘iLyaha’iLla-Pust Zvuchit V
Nashikh Serdtsakh, does nothing besides quoting Muslim hadiths.

In light
of preliminary information about the Tsarnaevs, there does not appear to be much, if any,
indication that Jokhar had any connection to jihadist groups or sympathized
with the most well-known terrorist organization in the North Caucasus called
the Caucasus Emirate, or any other similar groups. On the contrary, in one of
his blog entries, he laments having no American friends, having lived in the
country for so long. All of his friends were from the former Soviet Union.

Another
surprising piece of evidence suggests that Jokhar had accessed his webpage at 3
o’clock Boston time, but did not leave any comments. It was unclear whether it
was AM or PM time (http://vk.com/id160300242?z=tag160300242).
The bombs at the Boston Marathon finish line were detonated at approximately
2:50 PM, local time. The father
of the two brothers from Makhachkala reckons that his children were framed and
that his son Jokhar was like an angel (http://lenta.ru/news/2013/04/19/anzor/).
Friends of the brothers describe them as ordinary American guys.

In any case, the Boston
police already have made a mistake in their preliminary analysis of the brothers,
stating that the suspects may have received martial skills, including the
ability to make Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Chechnya. They were not
present in Chechnya, either during the first war (1994-1995) or during the
second war in Chechnya that started in September 1999. The brothers would not
have been able to receive any type of fighting or military experience because
of their age. Their family emigrated to the US when the eldest brother was only
16. Taking into account that before their move to the US they had lived in
Russia for two years and prior to that they had resided for one year in
Dagestan, it is hard to see their connection to militants operating in Chechnya
or elsewhere in the North Caucasus.

Russia asked
the FBI
to investigate Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan
Tsarnaev in 2011, a source in US law enforcement told Reuters. The FBI
had earlier reported on its website that an unnamed ‘foreign government’
had asked them for information. The slain Boston marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who
previously was designated as Suspect 1, was investigated in 2011 by
the FBI upon a certain foreign state’s request.

The state, which was not identified in the statement on the FBI
website, filed a request concerning Tsarnaev saying that he was a
follower of radical Islam and was preparing to leave the US for a
particular region to join “unspecified underground
groups.”

The FBI says they checked all the information possible, looking
for “derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online
sites associated with the promotion of radical activity,
associations with other persons of interest,” and checking the
suspect’s travel history, plans, and education history. Tsarnaev and his family members were also interviewed by the
FBI. Upon analyzing the data, the FBI had found nothing suspicious at
the time.

“The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or
foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government
in the summer of 2011. The FBI requested but did not receive more
specific or additional information from the foreign
government,” the FBI statement says.

'They were set up, FBI followed them for years'- Tsarnaevs' mother to RT

With the 24-hour manhunt for the second suspect of the Boston bombing
closed, RT remembers its conversation with the parents of the Tsarnaev
brothers, who claimed all along their children were set up. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva maintains her younger son is innocent and
like so many of the brothers’ acquaintances, claims they were good,
courteous kids and model students – especially the younger
19-year-old Dzhokhar. A US citizen who is presently in the Russian
Republic of Dagestan, she revealed to RT some suspicions of her
own.

Grief-stricken at the latest developments in the case, Zubeidat
expressed her dismay at the allegations, recounting Dzhokhar’s life
in the US and talking of his status among his peers and friends: he
was an honors student, loved by many of his friends and teachers.
And his older brother Tamerlan was a star athlete and student,
whose ambition was to one day appear on the US Olympic wrestling
team. But her biggest suspicion surrounding the case was the constant FBI
surveillance she said her family was subjected to over the years.
She is surprised that having been so stringent with the entire
family, the FBI had no idea the sons were supposedly planning a
terrorist act.

“They used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to
me…they were telling me that he [the older, 26-y/o Tamerlan] was
really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. They
told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these
extremist sites… they were controlling him, they were controlling
his every step…and now they say that this is a terrorist act!Never ever is this true, my sons are innocent!”

When asked if maybe she didn’t know about some of her sons’ more
secret aspirations and dark secrets, she said “That’s
impossible. My sons would never keep a secret.”

Finally, she said that if she could speak to her youngest –
Dzhokhar, she would tell him, “Save your life and tell the
truth, that you haven’t done anything, that this is a set
up!”

In an interview with Russian television the brothers’ father
Anzor Tsarnaev also claimed that they are innocent and somebody
might have set them up.

“I’m sure about my children, in their purity. I don’t know
what happened and who did this. God knows and he will
punish them,” he told Zvezda channel. “Somebody might
have set them up. I don’t know who and because of their cowardice
killed the boy.”

The father said he was unable to contact his sons or other
relatives. “Everything is switched off. I can’t reach my brother
there either. I can’t reach anyone! I just want information. Now I
fear for my boy, that they will now shoot him dead and then will
say 'He had a gun'.”

“I fear for my son, for his life. They should arrest him,
bring him, but alive. Justice should investigate who is right and
who is wrong,” he said.

Mr Tsarnaev recently spoke to his elder son, Tamerlan [Suspect
#1], telling him that he should take care of his younger brother.
Speaking of the Boston marathon bombing he told his son “Ok,
Thanks to Allah you were not close to there and did not
suffer.”

“I remember I even asked “Who could do something like
that?”

“We just talked. I asked him about our Dzhokhar [Suspect #2],
how was he. I told him, he should help him out and keep an eye on
him, so that he studies well. I told him ‘You left school, got
married too early, but the kid should finish [his education]’.
Because this is life – those who don’t study work a lot and work
hard. That’s why I was telling them study”.

Russian 'Alpha' Special Forces team-veteran and vice-president
of its International Association, Aleksey Filatov, believes there
is more to the case than meets the eye. He emphasizes, firstly,
that the origin and religious beliefs of the suspect, along with
the specifics of the bombing, have all been carefully pre-meditated
and planned by someone within the United States in order to
distract the public from the true identity and long-term aims of
the actual planners.

“Putting a young Chechen in those shoes was top-notch
professionalism in distracting everyone from the true identity and
motives of the planner,” he told RT.

“The executors were chosen to confuse the American public and
simultaneously untie the White House’s hands in a way that would
justify a departure from the rhetoric of non-involvement in
military action on foreign territories.”

Who is 'Misha,' the Armenian Muslim who radicalized Tamerlan Tsarnaev?

The Associated Press talks to the family of the alleged Boston bombers, and uncovers clues about a mysterious Islamist Svengali

The
"why" behind the Boston bombings appears to be coming into focus. On
Tuesday, multiple newspapers and other news organizations reported that the surviving bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, confessed to the crime and said that his older brother Tamerlan — killed last Friday
in a violent shootout with police — was the mastermind. Unidentified
government sources said that the brothers were "self-radicalized"
jihadists, acting alone out of anger over the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

TheAssociated Press has uncovered one tantalizing detail
that suggests Tamerlan's self-radicalization had an important
supporting character: Misha. The single name comes from at least two
family members who say they were once close to the Tsarnaev brothers:
The now-famous
Uncle Ruslan Tsarni and Elmirza Khozhugov, the 26-year-old ex-husband
of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar's sister Aliina. The Tsarnaev family was
nominally Sunni Muslim, but never very religious, say the AP's Adam Goldman, Eric Tucker, and Matt Apuzzo.

Then, in 2008 or 2009, Tamerlan met
Misha, a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish beard.
Khozhugov didn't know where they'd met but believed they attended a
Boston-area mosque together. Misha was an Armenian native and a convert
to Islam and quickly began influencing his new friend. [AP]

Misha is a very common name in Russia — a shorter form of Mikhail —
but come on, "there can't be that many bald, red-bearded Armenian
Muslims in the Cambridge area," says Dan Amira at New York. Still, the AP has been unable to locate
him after days of sleuthing, and if he's on the FBI's radar, they're
not talking. What else do we know about this mysterious Svengali?

Britain's Daily Mailsays Misha is "around 30" and is probably "based in a mosque that was a short drive from Cambridge." NBC News' Michael Isikoff — who calls the bearded convert "Mischa" — reports
that Tamerlan started falling under the Armenian's spell as early as
2007, and he provides this juicy detail, from Uncle Ruslan: "Mischa
presented himself as an 'exorcist' who specialized in 'removing demons
from people's bodies.'"

We all know that converts can be more
zealous than those born to a faith, but an Armenian native who converted
to a radical brand of Islam? As the world knows, Armenian Christians
suffered their own holocaust at the hands of Muslim Turks early in the
20th century, during the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. [Philly Inquirer]

National security writer Laura Rozen speculates on Twitter that Misha sounds like "the kind of mole Russia plants to keep [an] eye on emigre communities of concern," and could even be the source
that tipped off Russia to Tamerlan's conversion to radical Islam in
2011, which prompted Russia's call to the FBI. "Coming from ex-police
state, shouldn't [the] Tsarnaevs [have been] suspicious of [an] Armenian convert to Islam preaching 9/11 conspiracies at their table?"

Whoever he is — assuming he exists — Misha's influence over Tamerlan
appears to have been profound. "Somehow, he just took his brain,"
Tamerlan's uncle Tsarni tells the AP.
Tsarni says that once Misha came on the scene, Tamerlan stopped
listening to him and even his own father. Khozhugov, the former
brother-in-law, agrees:

When Misha would start talking, Tamerlan
would stop talking and listen. It upset his father because Tamerlan
wouldn't listen to him as much.... He would listen to this guy from the
mosque who was preaching to him. [AP]

Misha reportedly told Tamerlan that music isn't kosher in Islam, so
Tamerlan stopped making and listening to music and dropped out of music
school. He also started reading both radical Islamist publications as
well as Alex Jones' conspiracy-oriented Infowars website. Khozhugov says Tamerlan even tried to get a copy of the 1903 Russian anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claims that Jews are plotting to take over the world.

"Misha was important," Khozhugov tells the AP. "Tamerlan was searching for something. He was searching for something out there." Now, lots of people are searching for Misha.

Israeli police head to US to aid in Boston Marathon bombing investigation

The investigation into Monday’s deadly bombing at the Boston Marathon
has officially gone international: law enforcement officials from
Israel have been sent to the United States to assist in the probe. Israel Police Chief Yohanan Danino says he has dispatched
officials to Boston, Massachusetts, where they will meet with
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and other authorities, the
Times of Israel Reports.

Citing an earlier report published by the newspaper Maariv,
Times of Israel writes that Danino has dispatched police officers
to participate in discussions that “will center on the Boston
Marathon bombings and deepening professional cooperation between
the law enforcement agencies of both countries.”

The paper reports that Israeli law enforcement planned the trip
before the deadly pair of bombings on Monday that has so far
claimed three lives, but the discussions will now shift focus in
order to see how help from abroad can expand the investigation. In an address made Tuesday, Israel President Shimon Peres said
that tragedies such as this week’s incident in Boston, sadly, bring
people together from across the world.

"When it comes to events like this, all of us are one family.
We feel a part of the people who paid such a high price. God bless
them,” Peres said. “Today the real problem is terror, and
terror is not an extension of policy: Their policy is terror, their
policy is to threaten. Terrorists divide people, they kill innocent
people.”

Around 20 hours after two bombs detonated near the finish line
of the annual race, United States President Barack Obama went on
record to condemn the tragedy as a terrorist attack.

“This was a heinous and cowardly act,” said Obama from
the White House, “and given what we now know the FBI is
investigating it as an act of terrorism.”

But even as officials come to assist from as far away as Israel,
authorities are still in the dark as far as finding any leads in
the case. Pres. Obama has directed the FBI and US Department of
Homeland Security to assist in the investigation, but no agencies
have identified suspects or motives at this time.

Pres. Obama has also said that his administration has been
directed to implement “appropriate security measures to protect
the American people,” but details as to what that could mean
remain scarce. Meanwhile, at least one leading lawmaker is asking
for the US to respond to the terrorist attack by increasing the
scope of the ever-expanding surveillance program already growing
across the United States.

“I do think we need more cameras,” Rep. Peter King (R-New
York) told MSNBC after Monday’s attacks. “We have to stay ahead
of the terrorists and I do know in New York, the Manhattan Security
Initiative, which is based on cameras, the outstanding work that
results from that. So yes, I do favor more cameras.
They're a great law enforcement device. And again, it keeps
us ahead of the terrorists, who are constantly trying to kill
us.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has also confirmed that he has
dispatched law enforcement officers from the Big Apple to assist in
the investigation by meeting with agents at a Boston fusion center,
one of the DHS-funded data facilities that collects surveillance
camera footage and other evidence in order to analyze events like
Monday’s attack.

“We are certainly engaged in the information flow with the
FBI through our Joint Terrorism Task Force. We have two New York
City police officers, police sergeants, who are in the Boston
Regional Intelligence Center,” Bloomberg said on Tuesday.
“They’re up there, they’ve been up there since last
evening.”

But in a study conducted last year by the Senate’s bipartisan
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, lawmakers found that
those fusion centers have been more or less unhelpful in assisting
with terrorism probes.

The Department of Homeland Security’s work with state and local
fusion centers, the subcommittee wrote, “has not produced
useful intelligence to support federal counterterrorism
efforts.” Instead, they added, so-called
“intelligence” shared between facilities consisted of
tidbits of shoddy quality that was often outdated and
“sometimes endangering [to] citizen‘s civil liberties and
Privacy Act protections.”

“More often than not,” the panel added, information
collected and shared at DHS fusion centers was “unrelated to
terrorism.”

The Boston bombings
should spur stronger security cooperation between Moscow and Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, adding that they also show that the West was wrong in supporting militants in Chechnya. Putin said
that "this tragedy should push us closer in fending off common threats,
including terrorism, which is one of the biggest and most dangerous of
them."

The two brothers accused of the Boston bombings are ethnic Chechens who had lived in the U.S. for more than a decade.

Putin warned against trying to find the roots for the Boston tragedy
in the suffering endured by the Chechen people, particularly in mass
deportations of Chechens to Siberia and Central Asia on Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's orders. "The cause isn't in their ethnicity or religion, it's in their extremist sentiments," he said.

Speaking in an annual call-in show on state television, Putin criticized the West for refusing to declare Chechen militants terrorists and for offering them political and financial assistance in the past. "I always felt indignation when our Western partners and Western
media were referring to terrorists who conducted brutal and bloody
crimes on the territory of Russia as rebels," Putin said.

The U.S. has urged the Kremlin to seek a political settlement in
Chechnya and criticized rights abuses by Russian troops during the two
separatist wars since 1994, which spawned an Islamic insurgency that has
engulfed the entire region. It also provided humanitarian aid to the region during the high points of fighting there in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Russian officials have repeatedly claimed that rebels in Chechnya
have close links with al-Qaida. They say dozens of fighters from Arab
countries trickled into the region during the fighting there, while some
Chechen militants have gone to fight in Afghanistan. Putin said the West should have cooperated more actively with Russia in combatting terror.

"We always have said that we shouldn't limit ourselves to
declarations about terrorism being a common threat and engage in closer
cooperation," he said. "Now these two criminals have proven the
correctness of our thesis."

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Mission statement

About Me

I'm not here to make friends nor am I here to talk about girls, sports, cars or music. I'm here to have an impact on the minds of young, Anglophone Armenians. I want to expose visitors to this blog to an alternative perspective on Armenology, Christianity, history and the most important yet least understood topic on earth - geopolitics. Armenians need to be proud of the fact that their ancient homeland is the origin of human civilization. Armenians need to realize that Christ was not the Jewish Messiah. Armenians must understand that Armenia belongs within Russia's orbit. I have been closely observing Russia since Vladimir Putin's rise to power. Putin is one of the greatest political figures in history. With the Anglo-American-Zionist global establishment's toxic effects all around us, Putin's Russia has risen to become the last hope for the traditional nation-state and European civilization. The Caucasus is a violent and unforgiving place. Armenia's survival as a nation in the south Caucasus is only made possible by the presence of a strong Russia within the region. Hail Russia - the last front against Western imperialism, Globalism, Zionism, Islamic extremism and pan-Turkism.